


beauty in black

by Servetolive



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Anal Sex, Barebacking, Bisexual Cloud Strife, Blood, Body Modification, Body Worship, Brutal Black Project, Character Study, Cloud searching for answers, Dark, Erotica, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Masochism, Mature Reno, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Advent Children (Compilation of FFVII), Psychology, Relationship Issues, Reno Backstory, Romance, Rope Bondage, Rough Sex, Self-Harm, Shibari, Slice of Life, TW: Suicide Mention, Tattoos, alternative cloud strife, cloud strife x happiness, implied cloti, trauma processing, tw: rape mention
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:07:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23321437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Servetolive/pseuds/Servetolive
Summary: Everyone wants to look the way they see themselves.Cloud reclaims himself. Reno assists.
Relationships: Cloud Strife/Vincent Valentine, Reno/Cloud Strife
Comments: 33
Kudos: 69
Collections: Catching Feelings





	1. e x i s t

**Author's Note:**

> If you're unfamiliar with the Brutal Black Project, it's chaotic black ink tattoos done savagely over large portions of the body, with pain taking precedence over art. You can learn about it and watch the ritual [here](https://youtu.be/l9X6nSXwcas) and [here](https://youtu.be/S2fHloa712E).
> 
> Song for this chapter is [e x i s t](https://youtu.be/VS_fNVALbw4) by Jessaudrey.

Their third round ended with Reno’s biceps shaking at muscle failure, Cloud with his lidded, teary-eyes on him, his own palms slick against his friend’s chest.

Half-starving and half-mad with Reno’s cock filing against every nerve in his cunt, Cloud couldn’t help but notice how _blank_ his hands looked against his chest; against his own skin, even. They moved up Reno's neck as the other man edged, caressing the post-Shinra markings he'd put there to commemorate Sector Two--his birthplace, which no longer existed. 

Reno had no problem with hearing himself destroyed, deep inside Cloud, swimming in him, muscles tight around him. He came inside: an exclusive trust he’d earned some time ago and rarely hesitated to take advantage of. Cloud felt better each time, opening up to him bit by bit, letting go of something else that kept him detached, silent, or demure.

If only he could get him to stop biting his lips when he really _felt_ ; get him to give him some real music instead of the morsels of whimpers and gasps he allowed through his teeth once in a while.

Exhausted, Reno flipped over on his back next to Cloud and closed his eyes, raking in deep breath after breath.

“Goddamn,” he wheezed. “Why can’t I stop fucking you? What the fuck is wrong with me…”

Cloud knew it was a rhetorical question, but his mind became quicker and more savvy with every moment he spent away from his past, false life as a savior. He enjoyed having a tongue to match Reno’s every now and again, and enjoyed being someone’s addiction: an equal’s, at that. Somebody who didn’t feel sorry for him, admire him dolelishly, or look down on him. Someone he liked out of his own volition--not lusted after or obsessed over.

He reached over to fetch one of Reno’s cigarettes and rolled over onto his stomach, his torso arching naturally into the mattress, the long side piece of blackwork that Reno had etched into his ribcage and hip months ago facing the artist.

“There needs to be something wrong with you,” Cloud muttered, the cigarette bobbing from his bottom lip as he lit it, “For you to want to fuck me?”

\--

Cloud retrieved his jeans and slid into them, leaving the underwear in the dark somewhere, and found himself out on Reno’s balcony, where he had a full view of the wrecked city.

They got to know each other on that balcony, divulging secrets quietly as drinking buddies or old veterans might have done. Cloud imparted the most intense moments of his life to Reno while overlooking the twisted landscape of their handiwork--how giving the Black Materia to Sephiroth had been the most euphoric, erotic thing he had ever done; not just at that point, but beyond. Reno talked about his missing link to Cosmo Canyon there; the tribe he never knew, the voices from the Lifestream he’d ignored until they left him completely. The whore he was on the streets compared to the whore he became in a suit.

Both of them talked about how one’s guilt from dropping the plate on a few million people didn’t supersede or undercut the other’s guilt of providing the magic that buried several million more.

They talked, weeks ago, on a night just like this in complete darkness, about how much one hated Midgar--its death, its rotting ugliness, its scars jutting from earth to sky--and would not stay, no matter what his other partner thought or wanted; about how the other held its filthiness in such high, beautifying regard and would remain amongst its rubble forever.

Cloud thought of Reno’s words, _for all it’s shittiness, it’s mine, I love it, it’s home_ and looked at the landscape, and could finally see where the broken razor-edge outlines of its skyline would look more beautiful inked on flesh than an image of the city whole and glowing.

He looked down at his wrists and followed their bright contrast to his slender fingers, blank and pale even with nothing to reflect on, and saw the shadows of the dead ruins creeping up his skin, blending his hands with them.

His skin prickled as Reno joined him. 

“You tryin’ to take a picture of Midgar,” Reno asked in a hushed voice as he took a seat behind Cloud, “ _In the dark?_ ”

Cloud stubbornly adjusted the shutter settings on his phone. “Why not?”

“You need _light_ for that, shorty. There ain’t even a moon out.”

“Then how do people do it?” Cloud clicked his screen off, privately exasperated that despite his rural life having ended nearly ten years ago, certain things that would seem like common sense to others just had not caught up with him.

“Photo editing,” came Reno’s even, patient reply. “Them postcards n’ shit ain’t real, kid.”

He liked that about Reno. He never made fun of him for saying dumb things or even let on that he might be slightly amused or annoyed by Cloud’s ignorance. It was, perhaps, why his mother, in all her wisdom had told him to date someone older.

“Whaddaya need a picture for, anyway? It ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

Two hands slid around Cloud’s abdomen and pulled him back, setting him on Reno’s right leg. Fingers crawled up his ribcage, bypassing their own handiwork for a patch of new black scabs.

“When’d you get this one?” Reno’s cool breath felt good against the fresh ink just beneath his armpit. It was a sensitive spot, and the contact gave Cloud a quick flash of the experience that sent a brief shiver up his back, and was gone. 

“Last week.”

“Where?”

Cloud allowed his lover to lean him a bit to the right, opening his torso so that he could examine the branches of the tree that overlooked Aerith’s grave, and how the trunk faded into nothing toward the bird that began the one Reno had put there weeks ago: his very first; a ribcage piece that he’d sat for quietly, accepting every moment of pain. Burying it within that part of his body.

“Do you know Scizzo?”

“Scizzo…?” Reno found that the branches extended into Cloud’s armpit, where fine, blonde hairs were already beginning to poke through the ink. 

“He said he knew you.”

Reno stopped, and let Cloud’s arm down. “Bald guy? Big? Tribal?”

“That’s the one.”

Reno righted Cloud and turned his neck to look up at him. “He’s from Sector Four. He made it through?”

“Apparently.”

“Huh.” Reno found his pack of cigarettes and lit one before he continued. Cloud plucked it from his fingers, and he fished another one out. “Ain’t thought about him in ages. He kinda rough, ain’t he?”

Cloud closed his eyes briefly. The armpit was painful, and he recalled the pressure of Scizzo’s large hand against the keloid scar on his chest, holding him down as his muscles twitched, and the piercing way his tattooed eyes surveyed the pain on Cloud’s face.

Cloud allowed a drag of his cigarette to create a pause while he gathered his thoughts. “A little.”

“You fucked him, didn’t you?” Reno curled a hand around Cloud’s shoulder and pulled him down toward his mouth so he could see the entire side of his face, as if he were daring him to lie.

It was a playful, flirty action, and Cloud knew that. Reno loved to hear about Cloud’s sex life. Cloud leaned into the touch and put the cigarette to his lips.

It took one look from Cloud to give Scizzo--or anyone, really--consent to touch him. Within seconds of the tattoo finishing, Cloud was on his stomach, lifting his hips: _hurry, fuck me while the ink is wet._

“Yeah.” Some of the smoke went right into Reno’s face. Another of his hands curled around Cloud’s shoulder, his left thumb tracing the set of thick-rimmed eyes with bushy brows he’d inked three weeks ago.

“How was it?”

“I don’t remember,” Cloud admitted. “I mean, I remember it happening. I remember him fucking me, I remember that I got a tattoo. But I don’t remember how it felt.”

That wasn’t the first time Cloud had said such a thing to Reno, but they’d talked about it before, to mixed results. Reno told Cloud that he sounded like he was chasing a high; Cloud, having never done drugs before, had no idea how to relate to that information or how to take it to heart. 

“Collectin' more than just tattoos, huh?” Reno squared off Cloud’s back and ran his right hand across the other set of eyes--softer than the opposite pair, dripping black pools, thinner eyebrows. “You should get these colored, Cloud. Zack and Aerith had pretty eyes.”

“No,” Cloud said firmly. “I don’t want them in color.”

“Your skin would take it nicely,” Reno suggested.

“My skin takes black.” Cloud half shrugged away from Reno and leaned forward, redistributing his weight on Reno’s knees so that he would neither fall nor hurt him. He hated having to repeat himself. “I don’t want color. Ever.”

“Shame.” Reno released Cloud and leaned back on his chair just as Cloud opened his phone back up to watch the same video he’d replayed over and over again for the last few days, but on silent.

_blood, gritted teeth, needles, digging, blots of ink, screaming, sweat, orgasmic release_

A hand shot out and covered the phone.

“You’re still on that shit, aren’t you,” Reno said in his normal volume. 

The conversation picked up exactly where it had left off the last time they had seen each other and Reno had dismissed the idea.

“I want this.” Cloud shook Reno’s hand free and turned the phone back on.

He’d watched these same people get their skin raked up by metal, painting themselves in harsh, bloody lines, solid black, chaotic wisps of dark ink. No concept, just pain and void after void after void in their flesh; the artists restraining them, screaming in their faces, whites of teeth showing as they relished the agony and surrender of their human canvases. 

“I need it.”

The video was in black and white, but anyone that knew him could see plainly that Reno was among the torturers, a different animal than he was in a finely tailored suit or track pants. He invoked the suffering his needles caused; he loved it, he devoured it and laughed into the wounds.

Glancing at himself from the side in that particular condition was an uncomfortable mindfuck for him. Brutal Black was a different dimension. There, Meteorfall never happened. There was no geostigma; no Sephiroth, no collective experience or trauma that tied him or any of the participants to each other.

Just the pain.

Cloud wouldn’t be the first, last, or only person Reno had ever known to address one’s demons through body modification, but the extremes at which he was willing to go in such a short period of time concerned him. Only three months ago, Cloud had gone twenty-six years of his life never once considering getting tattooed, comfortably upholding his peoples’ age old standard that men not “adorn” themselves. His earrings, he recalled Cloud mentioning, simple as they were, caused his mother to break down in tears when he’d told her he got them. Now there were multiple holes in his ears, not all of them with a decorative piece, his previously virgin skin rapidly losing real estate to this new addiction by the week. 

“Why do you need it?” He’d asked that question weeks before, but Cloud seemed to have some kind of brain convulsion at that moment and couldn’t give a straight answer. He quickly rephrased the question. “What are you looking for?”

Cloud had long let the cigarette turn to ash in his fingers. He looked out at the landscape again as his mind brewed an answer. He had never been an articulate person, and the last four years of his life had taught him that the longer it took for him to speak, the better.

Reno was the only one close to him--Tifa included--who could sit in complete silence as he waited for a response, no matter how long it took.

“Beauty.”

The response made the air grow still around them. Reno was sure that if there were light, he’d see the dust settle on their arms.

He slid his right hand up Cloud’s back. Cloud remained still as a statue, caught up in the weight of his own word. 

“You’re beautiful, Cloud.” Reno’s left index finger moved gently past the long strand of hair on the side of Cloud’s face, and took a gentle, sweet trip down his cheek. “But you don’t gotta hear that from me.”

“I hear it from everyone,” came the cold reply. “All the time.”

Cloud sounded like he’d spent a lot of time thinking about this conversation. Reno gave him a clear path to it.

“What’s missing, shorty?”

“ _My_ beauty. I want my beauty.”

Reno had no other choice but to wait for Cloud to explain.

“You tell me I’m beautiful,” Cloud said. “Tifa tells me. Random people on the street tell me.”

“Must be true, then,” Reno piped with admittedly misplaced optimism.

“Sure,” Cloud agreed. “Was I beautiful back then, too? When everyone hated me when I was a kid? When Tifa wouldn’t even glance in my direction?”

Reno’s stomach dropped.

“Was I beautiful when I got blamed for her falling off the mountain? Or when I joined Shinra? When I failed my SOLDIER trials? When my squadmates ran a train on me?”

And it went on, and on--

_\--when I went home and hid in my room while Tifa was in danger, when Sephiroth killed my mom, when I didn’t help, when he ran me through, when I killed him the first time, when Hojo did everything horrible you could imagine to me, when he slid needles and fingers into me, when Zack died because I was weak, when I didn’t help Jessie, Biggs and Wedge and they were crushed, when I watched Aerith die, when I followed Sephiroth like a dog, when I gave him the Black Materia, when I loved every fucking second of it, when I had to tell everyone that I'm crazy and full of shit, when I killed him again, when Meteor ate Midgar, when I tried to kill myself and failed and was a vegetable for six months--_

“--Was I beautiful then?”

Reno had to fake a shiver to keep himself from shaking. Cloud had said every last word with unwavering calmness. It was as if he were actually posing a question to the universe, and was hopeful that the gentle breeze would pick up an answer from the dead still trapped with them in the city. 

He brought his arms up and around Cloud’s chest, and leaned his forehead between his shoulder blades; between the watching eyes of his loved ones, hands searching for the long trails of raised flesh on his friend's forearms.

“Goddamnit, _yes,_ you fuckin' idiot,” Reno said, knowing full well that he had no way to prove that to him.

“Then I want to see it.”

Reno opened his eyes.

“If I was beautiful all the times I fucked up, and beautiful all the times I was being ruined, then I can believe I’m beautiful now,” Cloud reasoned, “If I see it all there on me.”

Reno stared into space. He never pried too deeply into any one person’s motivation for coming to him to experience Brutal Black. It wasn’t his place to know; he kind of didn’t care. It was an opportunity to express something violent and feral on another person who would transform because of it and walk away with something they were looking for, and found. 

Cloud was no “other person,” though, and Reno had no desire to usher him back into an abyss from which he just came.

“I want to look the way I see myself every day," Cloud continued." I want to wear every moment of pain I’ve ever endured or caused on my body. Then we'll see if people will still stop and tell me how pretty I am."

"And if they don't?" 

"They'd be wrong."

The admission was a brave one, and it sent ice into Reno’s innately warm blood. He didn’t want to say it, but Reno was unsure if Cloud could even psychologically survive such a procedure.

Or if _he_ could.

“Haven’t you got enough scars?” He didn’t need to do it, but he ran his hand across the massive keloid tissue on Cloud’s chest.

“No. But I will, if you do this for me."

Sometimes Reno just wanted to grab him and shake him. He tried that once, in the beginning of the relationship while discussing Cloud's dead friends, the only time he'd lost his cool. Cloud had _smacked_ him--not the indignant way a lady would if you offended her honor, like in movies, but the way a grown man who'd been carrying a weapon since he was a child would if you offended his pride. 

It had made Reno stumble backwards and see stars for a moment, the memory of white fury in Cloud's blue eyes burned into his brain forever. 

They had both stared at each other in disbelief at the violations they had committed against one another until the fire went out of their eyes and they shook it off, continuing their conversation like it never happened. 

Cloud's fragility was so fucking deceptive, and he so often forgot about it. Everyone did. No wonder he was so frustrated: even after all this time, nobody took him seriously. Nobody believed him when he told them who he was or what he wanted. Reno was no different. 

Cloud was easily the most beautiful creature Reno and all of his other partners had laid eyes on, and it pained him that Cloud, with the many abuses committed against him and his many failures in life, could never, ever see it. He dropped his chin in confusion and embarrassment when complimented, hid himself behind clothing during dance classes, found ways to make himself small during performances, tried to seal his lips and disappear even while sweating in the heat of sex. Yet he moved with haunting grace and felt so good to watch and be inside of when he lost himself for long enough to drop his guard, even for a flash of an instant. He had beautiful, creamy skin and toned muscles that Reno envied on the streets and worshipped in bed. 

It was such a fucking waste. 

Understanding slowly began to weave its way through Reno, but it sat uncomfortably still with his own personal misgivings. 

"I think what you really need is a shrink, kid."

"I won't, if everything up here," He tapped the side of his head, "is out here." 

Reno bit the inside of his cheek. Cloud could do what he wanted with his body, but asking him to get involved was another story. Enough people had left their marks on him already. 

"Please," Cloud pressed. _Don't make me beg,_ Reno could almost hear it in Cloud's voice. "You're the only one who can do it."

"I said I'll think about it," Reno said, and the conversation ended the way it did two weeks prior, buying Reno more time to decide whether or not he wanted to return to his dark place, and drag Cloud with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did some editing, been working on this and the tone of the story changed rapidly with the upcoming chapters. <3


	2. Daytime Dies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The high lasted for minutes longer than any other time._
> 
> Cloud plants a seed of his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter is [Daytime Dies](https://youtu.be/EcaMzUUhFs4) by Fifty Grand & Kellbender. 
> 
> This got really pornographic, really fast, without me meaning for it to. Whoops. Thanks to my cousin, [powerofsand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/powerofsand/pseuds/powerofsand), for helping me with the dirty talk.
> 
> Also, happy remake release day. :)

Cloud texted: 

_I’m outside_ 16:52

Cloud wore his apprehension like a shroud of armor always when in public: shades on, chin tucked, walking briskly, loose wrinkled button up over a clean shirt, completely unapproachable. Previously, Reno had assumed that it was because that’s who Cloud really was, but he had gotten to know him better, and in a safe-space, Cloud’s anxiety melted away into something lithe, smooth, and best of all, _lazy._ Reno expected nothing from Cloud’s weekly visits. No suggestions to watch a movie together, cook together, or make use of their time in any other way than to just breathe the same air. The only expectation they were both guilty of harboring over one or another was the promise that they would eventually fuck, and they hadn’t tired of it yet.

As was their ritual, Reno took a cigarette with him out to his front door to watch for Cloud. There was no practical reason for it: he liked to watch Cloud make his way up from the street to his place to see how his stiff back softened with every step that brought him closer to Reno’s apartment.

Once Cloud had bounded up the stairs, skipping one or two along the way, and removed his glasses, Reno greeted him with the same hedonistic smile as always. “Hey, you.”

It had been such an honor the first time Cloud had smiled in turn, and it never lost its value to Reno. Lately, though, the smile was often followed by a long, slow kiss, complete with ass grabbing and lip smacking that the whole block was exposed to. 

Cloud hummed lowly as they ended the kiss, and pulled back to look up at Reno. His hands slid out of his partner’s hairline, thumbs sliding across the bright red ink on his cheekbones.

“You’ve touched these up,” Cloud noted. He looked more dazzled and dazed than he usually did after his weekly visits to Vincent. 

“You a tattoo expert now, huh?” He said, tapping the tip of Cloud’s nose with his thumb. Cloud closed his eyes slowly, leaned into digit, and then opened them. The whole action took several more seconds than it should have. “Damn,” Reno peered into Cloud’s eyes, the mako in them buzzing. “You high already?”

Cloud shook his head.

“Just a really good time at Vince’s, huh?”

He nodded, then slipped past Reno into the flat. “Let’s go in,” he said. “I wanna smoke a bowl.”

Cloud always returned from his weekly sessions with Vincent in a different headspace: always calmer, always slightly more pliable with words, touch starved, and what appeared to be… happy. Horny as hell. Reno didn’t quite understand it, but he never pried; just asked Cloud if he could see the lovely new patterns in his skin that Vincent’s ropes had left behind, and enjoyed Cloud’s openness before the effects faded away.

There was no new piece since they last met a week prior, just straight, pink bruises running criss-crossed across his back and chest in perfect symmetry. To Reno, it was nothing different than a temporary tattoo that would fade until Cloud went back to try another of Vincent’s new masterpieces. For it being a different medium, the canvas took it the same, and they weaved through Cloud’s real ink like it was all the same part of one picture.

He wore them like they were real, though, slipping out of his shirt and sitting on his haunches at the edge of Reno’s bed to give him a good look. Reno took a hit from his pipe first before passing it and the lighter to Cloud.

“Pretty,” he acknowledged, pressing his palm against the small of Cloud’s back and the intricate shape of a knot straddled by his dimples there. Cloud’s eyelids fluttered downward in thanks as he took the bowl and placed it against his lips. He was always so proud of every mark left on his body. “He used more rope this time.”

“You can see that?” 

“‘Course I can.” Reno sat back down in the chair beside his bed and picked his sketchbook back up while the herb worked through his system. If his touch lingered any longer, he’d forget his place in the piece he was working on. Cloud didn’t complain. He set the glass down and slid his own hands up and down his own sides, fingers twirling around the indents of his flesh, admiring them before they were gone forever. 

Then he leaned forward on his stomach to look at his phone and blew out a long billow of smoke. 

Before long, Reno could hear the familiar sounds of one of the recordings Cloud had been obsessing over for weeks.

He knew exactly what was happening at each timestamp without even looking up. 

_Demonic, Reno held a spread hand over his canvas’s face while the other drove ink in long, horizontal lines across his jugular, pressing the fidgeting target down into the table as he screamed._

_He laughed, “Hold fucking still, you pussy,” and worked on the collarbone._

_The man jerked so hard that Reno had to jump back, stopping the machine, lifting the needle._

_He cackled, licked his lips, and then kicked one of the legs of the table. The canvas started violently and shook._

“Y’know,” Reno said, side-eyeing Cloud’s back from where he sat, “I never have to see those people ever again after I do that to them.”

If Cloud were listening, he made no indication that he’d heard. 

“You do realize that, huh, Cloud?” Reno added another layer of shading to the landscape of a lone tree left standing on the outskirts of Edge, a popular place to picnic despite the fact that it was really just a skeleton and hadn’t bloomed since anyone’s recent memory. The client who wanted it had lost his wife and three children in Meteorfall, and they had apparently been frequent visitors. Pretty common type of request, but he wanted to do it justice every single time, no matter how many people commissioned him to make monuments in their skin for the dead loved ones.

Cloud bit his bottom lip and moved onto the next video, pulling a cigarette from the pack that was already available at the foot of Reno’s bed and lighting it. The muscles in his back tensed as he watched the next victim flipped over onto his stomach, ponytail jerked to the side so that the artist could look him in the eye while he drilled ink into his back.

“Holy shit.” Cloud took the cigarette out of his mouth and rolled over off the bed.

“Reno, is this yours?”

Reno looked up at Cloud, tiredly, glanced at himself gritting his teeth in the phone, and then went back to his sketch.

“Yep.”

Reno’s own Brutal tattoo had not been a particularly imaginative idea, but it was an obvious one, and it was wholly _his._

Cloud watched the entire process of Shinra’s massive logo, the red triangle in solid black with the characters sculpted beautifully out of negative space, razed into Reno’s back.

 _Reno swore, bit onto a bloody towel,_ screamed _when the needle moved over the hard bone of his shoulder blade. The artists--his partners in crime--who served him spared him nothing, and showed the same mercy Reno himself had given to his canvases. Reno was no masochist. He didn’t take the pain as gracefully as some of the people he had worked on, nor did he quit before it was over._

_He did puke into a bucket though, and laughed when he was finished. His thumbs up was covered in ink and blood._

“You seemed so happy,” Cloud whispered, his voice floating to Reno on the wisps of smoke from his cigarette.

“Yeah, ‘cause it was fuckin’ over.”

Cloud sighed and lay flat on his stomach, curling in on himself so that he faced Reno. He put his phone down, and watched his friend sketch, sliding his hands comfortably into the space between his thighs.

Reno glanced up every now and again, noticing how Cloud’s back was arched, and the blue glare in his eyes brightening as his lids fell, heavy with arousal. His body language always changed when he wanted some. He pointed his toes, elongated parts of his torso, tucked half his face into the crook of his elbow. It was cute, and it always did its job of getting Reno’s attention.

Reno blew a soft chuckle through his nose, and smirked. “I see you, shorty.” He wasn’t at a stopping point though, and he kept sketching as Cloud swung his legs over the bed, and began taking the rest of his clothes off.

“Just lemme finish with this commish,” he said as Cloud tossed his pants to the corner of the room, and moved to sit at the edge of the bed. ‘It was due a couple days ago and I really--” Reno glanced at him just as he opened his knees for a split second to remove his underwear. He caught a glint of something beneath his pubic mound and was forced to do a double take.

“Sssshit.” Reno’s cock nearly jumped through his pants. He tossed his sketchbook to the side, stood up, and ran a palm along the bulge in his sweat shorts as Cloud discarded his underwear and leaned back onto his arms.

Cloud wasn’t as good with words as Reno, but since he’d become a collector, his ability to allow his body to speak for him had improved; there was no denying that. Their other friends might have their misgivings, but it was certainly true that being tied up weekly and having images etched into his skin had provided Cloud with better posture, a glow, and the very beginnings of what Reno would call a _voice_ for himself, no matter how little he actually opened his mouth.

And they looked fucking good on him.

Reno allowed the narrow slits in Cloud’s eyes to draw him forward the first few steps, and then let his two glistening holes--one plugged nicely with a silver device--between his legs do the rest.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Reno murmured through a bitten lip as he placed himself between Cloud’s legs, sliding his fingers underneath his thighs to toy with the geometric patterns behind his knees. “You plugged up?”

Cloud blinked at Reno slowly, head tilted as if he were asking Reno what he was going to do about it. “Yep.”

“Lemme see.”

Cloud spread his legs apart further. “Have a look yourself.”

This might have been the fastest amount of time Reno had switched from work-to-fuck since the beginnings of his days as a Turk. Cloud _never_ volunteered anal, and after one attempt ending painfully, Reno never asked again. He did, however, plant the seed forever in Cloud’s head by insisting that Cloud fuck _him_ every now and again. He involved Cloud in the prepping ritual, let him pick a toy to gauge him with and strap up. When he took it from Cloud, he sang him praises and told him how good it felt to have him inside.

Something was definitely different. And it would still be different afterwards, so he dismissed his misgivings and knelt between Cloud’s thighs. 

There was something so aesthetically pleasing about what Cloud was offering him; pink, silver, shaved, moist, _clean_. It was art in and of itself to have Cloud open his legs for him. 

He applied light pressure to the base of the plug and looked up to catch Cloud’s reaction. 

Cloud sighed through his nose and closed his eyes. His lashes fluttered. No indication of pain, just him tightening his hole around the plug, his cunt engorged and wet.

“Been practicing, huh?” 

Cloud leaned forward when he felt Reno’s tongue press against the slip of skin between his holes. A thumb in his cunt pressed the thin layer of skin down against the plug. Cloud’s breath hitched in his throat, and he reached out with both hands, straight for the ink on Reno’s back.

“Mm-hmm.” He was looking for the differences in texture between the void created by the _Shinra_ characters and the solid wall of black. His fingers found the hitch in the skin that rose to the shoulder blade and the image of Reno’s pained, clenching expression as the needles worked that space flashed into Cloud’s mind. He gasped involuntarily and lifted his hips.

Reno ran his tongue right up Cloud’s slit as he stood and wiped his mouth. Cloud didn’t wait on dropping Reno’s pants and sucking him--not that he needed to, the man was fucking _rock_ hard already, but Cloud liked the noises Reno made and the dirty things he said to him, all while standing over him, abs working his cock into his mouth.

“When did you become such a greedy little ho?” He asked playfully, holding his chin gently in place as he guided his cock into Cloud’s mouth, then pulled it out. 

"Maybe I've always been," Cloud said, before his mouth was filled again. His hand found the front of Reno's left thigh and the unpolished work there from his adolescence: the stick-and-poke markings of his tribe, the numeral _III_ and the faded sunset-colors of a feather. 

Those were Cloud's favorites on Reno. They weren't good, but they were done by his own hand with limited ability, and they meant something to him that money and skill couldn't duplicate. 

Cloud envied things like that. Skills and talent that he could measure, and that could stand the tests of time. He traced the orange plumage of the feather with one hand and reached under to slide Reno’s balls against his palm in the other. 

Reno tipped his head back, the taught muscles in his abdomen rippling as he slowly fucked Cloud’s mouth, whispering his affirmations _yeah, take me all in, wider baby, I wanna hear you…_

Sucking his boyfriend off gave Cloud nearly as much power as he felt with a weapon in his hands, if not more. It didn’t matter that he did what he was told, he loved to be the one that made Reno feel good, just as much as Reno loved being the one that Cloud opened up to. He let a finger curl under Reno’s balls and press into his ass, and watched him jerk forward into his mouth. 

“Damn you,” Reno grunted, sliding out of Cloud’s throat. “Where’d all this come from, huh? Trying to make me nut in two minutes...”

Cloud didn’t always have a response for the things Reno said, but he loved to listen to him. His vulgarity was artful to him, perhaps because it was just so fucking different. He hungered for it all the time when he returned to his grey life at home.

Reno let him go, and reached over for the condom that was sitting on the ledge of the bed. 

As soon as Reno moved it to his teeth, Cloud reached up and closed his hand over the package, crushing it. His older friend had time only to give Cloud a brief warning look before he curled two fingers around Reno’s wrist and pulled him forward into a lingering kiss. The condom fell to the floor.

Reno’s head swam. He used to teasingly refer to Cloud as a pillow prince; now his mind struggled to keep up with tactile reality as Cloud darted his tongue inside his mouth, used one hand to free Reno’s hair from his ponytail and the other to pull his plug out, grab Reno’s cock, and set it against his hole. He did everything so smoothly and quickly that Reno had no opportunity to resist, and he was easily overloaded with sensory input.

“Sneaky bitch,” Reno gasped into Cloud’s mouth between their lips connecting, as he reached forward for the bottle of lubricant. His hair poured over his shoulder and dangled onto the side of Cloud’s face. Cloud turned into it, pressing his lips into the strands while Reno pulled his hips up and placed his right hand against the blank side of his ribcage.

Cloud wanted it so bad. Cheeks and shoulders flushed, he lifted his hips so Reno could see him, fingers spreading both holes, begging with his eyes. With so much written all over him, Cloud never needed to say a word.

But when he did, it put Reno under his thumb immediately.

“You can always tell me ‘no.’”

"Fucking tease," Reno said between deep, maddened breaths as he looked down at Cloud's offerings, both wet and ready. "You know damn well I can't."

The look on Reno’s face as he pushed in would have sent Cloud over the edge immediately, had he not needed to close his own eyes to keep his brain from overstimulating. Reno went in slowly, placed a forearm above Cloud’s head, and wove caressing fingers through his hair.

“Fuck,” Cloud gasped as Reno pushed himself to the hilt. His back arched naturally and his teeth clenched. Reno stroked his scalp, pressed his lips to his temple, and had to remind himself to breathe. 

He shared the advice with Cloud. "Breathe," he whispered above Cloud's mouth just as he caught a wince. At the sound of Reno's voice, his face slackened, and he moaned an exhale.

They stayed there for a moment, just to become familiar with the new way their bodies fit together.

“You good?”

Cloud grounded himself by trying to match his breathing with Reno’s. “Mm..hm.”

Reno moved, pulling out slowly, holding himself up over Cloud, nose to nose, their lips nearly touching. Their breaths made their mouths wet with condensation. 

Cloud pulled his right hand through Reno’s hair, and used the other to place his friend’s hand over his ribcage, curling around it so that his nails dug into his flesh. Reno caught on and dragged the skin underneath.

“You want me to hurt you like that?” Reno breathed against Cloud’s cheek, cock still thick and heavy inside Cloud.

Cloud’s response was to lock his calves together, bear down to open himself up, and force Reno deep inside of him. The skin on his torso twisted underneath Reno’s fingers as he suddenly lost control of _everything._

The burn was good; it was sweet, savory, hot, cold, pain, salvation, beauty and trash all at once and inside of Cloud, adorning him and smearing him. Reno couldn’t stop, even if he had the mind to, and he told his partner so, _I can’t fucking stop, fuck, you’re tight, you’re tight, it’s good, it’s so fucking good_

Before he lost his mind, Cloud twisted his hand around Reno’s hair and pulled it so that he could look at him in the eyes while he finally sang for Reno, his voice rolling between notes in a crescendo _hurt me, hurt me, hurt me_

Reno obeyed, he had no choice; Cloud had him sucked in, grasping his cock, timing his clenching with Reno’s hips. He pressed his forehead hard to Cloud’s, raked his skin with his nails, sank his teeth into his collarbone. Cloud twitched and writhed under each bite and scratch, thanking him with a new, gorgeous sound every time. The noises he made were impossible to replicate by him or anyone else ever; they would haunt him in his dreams and sing him to sleep.

_Hurt me, Reno, please, god fuck_

_I_ am _hurting you._

Cloud flicked a switch, and Reno fucked him with abandon, without any capability of stopping or caring if he destroyed the rest of what lay unmarked on Cloud’s body.

He slid two fingers into Cloud’s cunt, felt his own cock working beneath it, and watched his lover's blue eyes roll to the back of his head as he curled his fingers.

_Hurting you enough now, baby? Am I hurting you, you fucking pussy?_

Cloud saw Reno in black and white. 

It hurt. It had to hurt. Cloud came wide-eyed, open mouthed, seizing every muscle in his body, unable to speak or make a sound or draw breath, drenching them, long past the point of screaming.

For Reno, it was like his soul was being sucked out of him, into Cloud, poured into the marks he left everywhere he touched. He made inhuman noises as Cloud drained his cock, his body continuing in a ghost-rut inside Cloud long after he was finished.

The high lasted for minutes longer than any other time.

\--

Reno awoke to the feeling of Cloud’s naked body, now dry and clean, sliding up against his back on his twin bed.

They’d passed out almost immediately after. Reno wanted to reach for his phone, but when he did, pain shot up his arm as if he’d been lifting weights all day.

“What the fuck happened?” Reno whispered. The same thing occurred when he tried to move other parts of his body. Cloud slid his legs between his to get him to stop moving.

“We had sex,” Cloud mumbled lazily until Reno’s shoulder.

“No, we didn’t. We had a fuckin’ out of body experience.”

Cloud’s voice didn’t travel in pitch, but his laughter, rare as it was, was like music now. He pressed his cheek against Reno’s black Shinra logo, smoothing over it with his hands. 

This man had bewitched him. Cloud’s touch was like gold, and Reno melted into it, pliable and willing. Cloud had wanted something from him and had gotten it, without needles or ink. It amazed Reno, and he curled his arm around his torso to play with the patterns of Aerith’s flowers that he had put there weeks before.

“Why did you do this?” Cloud asked, sighing as Reno’s nails grazed against the beak Zack’s Gongaga heckler; the tufts Sephiroth’s single feather.

Reno had never truly thought about why he would go through the intense pain of permanently marking himself with a symbol of shame and murder for millions. It was something he just _did_.

“Because it’s who I am,” he said. “And fuck the rest.”


	3. Rip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _What he did know was that of all the people in the world, Vincent was perhaps the_ one _other that truly understood Cloud, as they had such alike shared experiences that they could be brothers. And yet, he spent the least amount of time with him._
> 
> Reno looks to Vincent for advice about their mutual lover.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter is [The Rip](https://youtu.be/kBOaLjtR4mw) by Portishead.
> 
> Disclaimer: I have minimal experience with shibari/kinbaku, so please do not try to repeat anything in this story. (It's probably incomprehensible anyway)

Days always started early for Cloud. It was a comforting trait given to him by his late mother, and solidified by his time with Shinra. Among all the chaos in his head, it ensured that he kept at least some semblance of order, and it felt like a lingering gift from the only family he’d ever known, of whom there remained no trace in the real world.

Very much the opposite of Reno, who had once shared with Cloud that despite his ten years of service with Shinra--five as a grunt, five as a Turk--he never truly became accustomed to mornings. When Cloud left the bed, he made sure to do so in a way that disturbed Reno the least. Reno curled in on himself and the warm spot that Cloud left behind, drawing his blanket over him.

Cloud rummaged through his bag and pulled out a pair of sweatpants. Even though he had a permanent residence, it seemed more and more like he was living as a vagrant.

He did his daily routine of sun salutations on Reno’s balcony, moving along with the rising sun, pointing his mind more toward the warmth on his bare skin than the pull in his muscle in the downward dog as he pressed into each position for as long as he could keep his mind from wandering. 

By the time he’d finished, Reno stood at the glass door, watching him with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, wearing nothing but boxers. He normally wouldn’t have bothered waking up for another two hours or so, but there were things he wanted to get done, and time with Cloud was always over before he knew it. It wasn’t such a bad deal: watching Cloud glide into each position, tensing muscles in his shoulders and back, was another way of both fucking and loving him without expending any energy.

“You could have joined me, y’know,” Cloud said to him, after recovering from his start. 

“You know I hate yoga.”

Cloud shrugged and slipped past him into the apartment to look for food. “I don’t know why. They’re just stretches. It’d certainly help with your dancing.”

“What’s wrong with my dancing?” Reno asked, half-offended. He tossed his cigarette butt.

“Your _pole_ dancing.”

“Oh,” Reno rolled his eyes, and followed him inside, leaving the door open to let in fresh air. “Yeah, yeah. You know it ain’t my jam.”

“It’s a full body workout.” Cloud opened the fridge, spotted an avocado that was just slightly overripe, and fished a slice of regular bread out from its bag on top of the fridge. It was going stale. Reno often forgot to close his perishables to keep them fresh. “And you’re good at it. Speaking of which…”

And they went on to discuss their week’s schedules, all the way through Cloud’s avocado toast, into the bathroom where they shared a shower and did nothing but just _talk._ Although they didn’t see each other privately during the week, they made a point to take classes together: Reno studenting in Cloud’s pole-men’s class, and Cloud studenting in Reno’s choreo class. It supplemented their intimacy on the weekend and gave them other things to talk about besides tattoos, or their pasts.

“You teaching today?” Reno asked, facing Cloud’s back under the shower, and reaching up toward the water so that it dripped down his arm and his side.

Cloud ran his hands through his hair, and made sure to treat his black scabs delicately. “No. I mean, yes. I have a client at two who is training for a marathon. And then the other one right after. But at the studio, no.”

“The pregnant lady?” Reno scrubbed Cloud’s back, and then turned around so that Cloud could do the same. That Cloud had found his niche as a personal trainer was something that impressed him, as he had previously had a hard time imagining him doing anything but odd jobs, which made him sad for all the talent that defined him.

“Yeah, well, she’s not pregnant anymore. I need to find a good routine for her that won’t kill her. She said I was too rough last time.”

“You _are_ rough. Not everyone was in the military.” 

“Hm.” Reno felt a cold gust of air as Cloud exited the shower. Had he not had his eyes closed from shampooing his hair, he would have liked to look at Cloud while his hair was wet. He was like a completely different person with no spikes jutting out everywhere, and he was the type to recognize every detail about a person that was more than either a casual enemy or a casual fuck.

They continued their conversation with Reno sitting on the closed toilet, combing tangles out of his split ends, and Cloud taking a small pair of beauty scissors to the sides of his hair. He had been toying with the idea of cutting it short save for his long sidelocks, modifying the sides into a fade, which Reno couldn’t quite imagine: a fact that Cloud admitted was the reason he wanted to do it.

 _I’m tired of people recognizing me,_ he had said. Reno knew that there was a masked meaning behind that: it wasn’t only that he didn’t want to be recognized as the famous Cloud who had spearheaded the fight against Meteor, but that he didn’t want to be recognized as _Cloud,_ whose true enemy wasn’t Meteor at all. That was somebody that no one who saw him in the streets knew. 

He didn’t have to guess that the reason for Cloud’s hesitation to change his hair was that he feared the reaction of at least one other lover.

“Cloud,” Reno said, interrupting himself mid-thought as Cloud snipped at small, negligible pieces of his spikes, then accidentally hacked off a larger slice. “Why don’t you let me get my clippers and do that for you before you fuck your head up?”

“No,” Cloud said quickly, setting the scissors down.

“You sure? I can do you a fade.”

“I’m not ready for that yet.”

Reno shrugged and squeezed the water out of his hair into his towel.

\--

Cloud was gone for four hours. During that period, Reno had plenty of work to do on his own: actual work with the ongoing recovery efforts in the city. It was remote work on Mondays, and he could have done it then, but he wanted to address another matter with that time the next day.

There was really no reason for Cloud to return. He had a scheduled dinner with Tifa that night, as he did every Sunday, but when he insisted that he would be back to at least say good night, Reno didn’t argue. Tired and aching from his lessons, he spent the rest of the evening in Reno’s bed, wrapped around him, making out with him slowly and softly.

There was no pressure to fuck. Cloud just seemed to enjoy being close to someone--whether Reno was exclusive in that, he didn’t know, or care--and it made him feel good just the same. Reno slid his hands up his shirt and around his ribcage and Cloud entwined their legs together, opening his jaw to Reno and caressing the tattoos on his face and neck.

There had been no discussion about the night before, but it had been on Reno’s mind all day, and was now at the front of his thoughts as he enjoyed the soft, yet unyielding pleasure of Cloud’s toned muscle and smooth skin. The stark contrast of violence and tenderness in Cloud was not something that Reno had previously dealt with in any one person that he gave a shit about.

Bloody tattoos and then soft kissing, pain and then deep sleep, early rising and shadows on the skin. Sun salutations and then lopping off chunks of his hair.

Cloud’s desire for change was out of scope for Reno.

The sun went down. Cloud’s alarm went off to remind him to leave. He reached over, looked at it, and shut it off before curling back into Reno.

He remembered the first time he’d tried to put his arms around Cloud, the other man had turned around so as not to face him. Now, Cloud curled into Reno, toying with the ink on his back, fingers tangling in his red hair. 

“Cloud,” Reno asked gently. “Don’t you got dinner at the house?” If he stayed in his bed for much longer, he was afraid they might fuck, and if Cloud were going to be late for a meeting with Tifa, it wasn’t about to be because of him.

Cloud’s eyes slid shut. Clearly, he was comfortable. So was Reno. “Mm-hm.”

Reno looked at his watch. It was fifteen after five. Dinner was meant to be at six, but something about shoving Cloud out of his bed to remind him of obligations that had nothing to do with him seemed wrong.

He followed Cloud’s lead and fell asleep.

\--

Cloud woke up at seven, and looked at his phone. Even then, he seemed in no hurry to leave.

Reno bade him goodbye at his front door with a kiss, and watched as he walked--not ran--before he disappeared down the street.

It always unsettled him that every time he said goodbye to Cloud, despite the fact that he’d seen him nearly every week since they had started together, he had it in his head that it may be the last time he ever saw him.

Reno picked up his phone as soon as Cloud was out of his line of sight, and dialed Vincent’s number.

\--

Reno didn’t know to what extent Cloud and Vincent’s relationship had gone, or even if it were comprehensible to anyone but the two of them. 

What he did know was that of all the people in the world, Vincent was perhaps the _one_ other that truly understood Cloud, as they had such alike shared experiences that they could be brothers. And yet, he spent the least amount of time with him. 

Nonetheless, their visits were important: while Cloud might vary between extending or shortening his time with Reno, Tifa, and whoever else he might see, he remained unbreakably consistent in keeping appointments with Vincent.

Vincent’s return to the fold had been a relatively covert one. Everyone knew that he had taken up residence near Kalm, in lovely, modern housing that had a high ceiling and large glass windows, but Reno was among few to know what he actually did there, or what had brought him back to the living world. On schedule for once, Reno knocked on the door and waited. 

He wore something simple, yet new: a plain black tracksuit that Cloud had bought him with a white shirt underneath. He owned a few others exactly the same--and several more in vibrant colors--but he remained fond of that one for obvious reasons. Cloud had a hard time with gifts for people. 

Vincent opened the door, and Reno gazed up at him, eyes widening briefly. The last time he had seen Vincent in person, his hair had still been long and he still wore the tattered robes of his long, post-captivity slumber. Now, he had largely returned to his appearance as he was when he was a Turk: slacks, a loose white shirt, decent shoes. A modern-day gargoyle still he was, though, and his red eyes gleamed in the moonlight.

Two former Turks, and they couldn’t be more different.

“Reno,” Vincent nodded in greeting. His voice was so smooth and calm; he reminded him of a Sephiroth that had never known insanity or irrationality. He stepped aside to allow Reno into his home.

“Heya.” Reno scratched his head and entered, immediately in awe of the sharp, smart construction of the interior. “First time I’ve seen your place. It’s real nice.”

“Thank you.” He let the door fall closed behind them, and his body language alone drew Reno into following him into the main living space, slow enough to give Reno a chance to look around.

Reno caught sight overhead of the giant rig in the ceiling, available to be lowered by a pulley, taking the place of a chandelier.

“Whoa,” was all he could say. To his right, a large St. Andrews Cross occupied space in a corner, with a varying array of leather whips, paddles, and other sexual torture devices decorating the walls behind it.

“I have the kettle on,” Vincent said, as he left Reno to take in his surroundings, the soft clack of his shoes dissipating into the kitchen. “I’ll pour tea.”

“Tea?” Reno said, approaching the shelf, and picking up a bullwhip, testing its weight. Certainly, its original function was to be used on beasts: not people. “You got anything harder?”

“I do.” There was the delicate sound of pouring water, and Reno looked over his shoulder to see that there was a fully stocked, elegant bar near the long, black table in the dining room. “I can add something to your tea, if you’d like.”

“I’d like, actually.” Reno rubbed his temple as a speculum caught his eye. This sort of thing was something that he saw in movies or joked about with friends, but it wasn’t a part of his reality. It was no secret that Vincent had no capability of feeling either physical pain or pleasure, and the idea of him enjoying _tea_ was as foreign to him as the idea of him using any of these devices on the people that came to him. It was something he just couldn’t imagine, yet it seemed like an obvious conclusion.

“Whiskey?” Vincent asked.

“Yeah.”

Vincent rejoined Reno in his chamber, and handed him the hot drink. He carried one for himself, and seemed taken aback when Reno insisted on clinking their glasses together in salutation before having a hot sip.

Reno looked down at his cup and frowned. The taste of whiskey neither lost itself in nor drowned out the taste of the strong, earthy leaves. “This tea is really fucking good,” he said.

“Cloud brought it,” Vincent informed him, as he walked toward an unlit table set under one of the windows. “A specialty of his hamlet.”

“How’d he find it?”

“He picked them himself on a trip to the outskirts. Please.” Vincent gestured for Reno to sit across from him, and then waited until his guest was seated before he took his place.

There was a space of silence between them as Vincent waited for his tea to cool, turning a chunk of rock-sugar over in the bottom to sweeten it. Reno took note and repeated the action. 

Finally, he asked, “All healed up now?”

In response, Vincent unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, and peeled the corner open to show Reno that the solid black markings that he’d put there almost half a year ago were completely healed, and had turned into the lovely teal-ish color that black ink on flesh always became. 

Reno leaned forward to have a look. “It took well, huh?”

“I believe it did. Yes.”

Vincent was the last person that Reno had tattooed in the Brutal practice, and he had always imagined that he would be the last _ever._ After dealing with normal people--humans in the most biological sense--and pushing their pain thresholds, watching them cry, scream, holler, swear, and end sessions early, there was something surreal and calming about digging ink into the flesh of someone who felt no pain.

It had been the only time that Reno didn’t swear, yell, or laugh, and it was his longest sitting. It was meditative for the both of them, and cathartic. The wall of ink covered Vincent’s torso, his arms, and large portions of his thighs; it had been Reno that tapped out, after several long sessions had his wrists begging for no more.

The only time Vincent made a sound was when Reno filled in his sternum. It was the tiniest _hmph_ , and a microsecond of flickering eyelashes, exposing the pain in the red irises before they closed to Reno in that state forever.

“It looks good on you,” Reno said. In truth, he didn’t really know. Vincent was a completely different person now--so he heard. He didn’t know him besides what he read from the old Shinra archives and what his friends said about him.

“Thank you. And thank you for doing it.”

Reno nodded, and then jumped in.

“Does Cloud know that you got tattooed by me?”

“Unless you told him, no. It’s not something I discuss with others.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Has he been inquiring about it?”

Reno looked out the window and dragged his hand down his chin. “Yeah.”

“And this troubles you?”

“Mm-hm.”

Vincent’s mouth made no sound as he drank, or swallowed. There was an eerie silence around the two of them that Reno knew wasn’t natural, but he didn’t feel unsafe around it. It was relaxing not to hear every speck of dust settling or the sounds of nature rustling as they talked about this. As the seconds went by, he could understand why Cloud would come to Vincent to get away from the noise in his head, and wondered why he never opted to stay longer.

“May I ask why?”

“If I do this to him,” Reno started, leaning forward on his arms. Vincent’s eyes flickered toward him. “Won’t I be doing the same thing everyone else has done? Leaving a mark on him. Claiming him. Making him mine. I dunno…”

Vincent nodded quietly as Reno went on, stirring his tea, listening.

Reno leaned back in his chair and gazed out the window. “Let’s say our relationship ends. We never speak again. He’ll look every day in the mirror and remember me and the shit I did. Normally I don’t worry about this with my clients, but--”

“Is Cloud your client?”

Reno stopped to consider the question. “No.”

“Okay,” Vincent said, calm as ever. “Continue.”

“You’ve seen me do this before,” Reno went on. “You know I’m a monster.”

“So am I. And Cloud sees me every week.”

Reno understood the meaning behind Vincent saying that he’s a monster. He could legitimately claim the most literal interpretation of the word in existence. Reno didn’t want to argue that, but he had no desire to give in to the dark invitation of Cloud’s skin and vulnerable state and risk becoming a version of himself with this fragile person that he’d rather forget. 

Reno was one of Cloud’s strongest advocates for self-agency, but at the same time, there were lines he’d rather not cross. 

“Listen,” he sighed, exasperated, and began to explain. “The other night, I fucked him. Like, really hard. He wanted me to hurt him, so I did. I know he was imagining being tattooed. I know he wanted me to fuck him in his ass so that he could feel pain.”

Vincent went on sipping his tea. “And?”

“And it was fucking _amazing,_ and I felt myself the way that I was when I preyed on people, and I _wanted_ to give him what he wanted, and I wanted to _take_ from him--”

“That sounds… completely natural,” Vincent reassured. “And consensual. Why don’t you give him what he wants?”

“What if I lose it on him and fuck him up?”

Vincent blinked at Reno, slowly. “I imagine you would face the consequences of that.”

Reno shook his head in denial, and leaned back into his chair. “Nah, see, I don’t want that. I don’t wanna do this. I just want things to stay like they are now.”

“Is this more about what _you_ want, or what Cloud wants?”

Reno sighed loudly, and stared out the window. For the first time in his life, there was peace. There was no scramble for food, no pressure to deliver results, no insane interpersonal dynamics, no navigating bureaucracy and red tape, no killing, no knee busting. There was him, his own hobbies, his work, his art, his other play partners, and this beautiful kid who came and went like the blissful gusts of wind that visited so often now without the megastructures of Midgar blocking their path, and whose presence--no matter how short or long--he enjoyed and appreciated. 

“Of _course_ this is about Cloud.”

“Are you sure? You’ve only been talking about how you feel. What is it that Cloud wants?”

“That ain't my fucking intention,” Reno said, feeling slightly frustrated, if for no other reason than that he wasn’t enjoying the truth about his misgivings. “He wants me to cover him in these fucking tattoos, he wants me to do it the way I did all those other people, and I don’t understand why, and I don’t want him to give himself to me like that, and I don’t wanna be another one of his owners, okay?”

Vincent raised an eyebrow. “Even for a few hours?”

“Even for a few hours.”

“Even if he needs it?”

Reno sucked his teeth. “Why? Why does he need this?”

Vincent, who had also been staring out the window with Reno, finished his tea, and looked out at the same spot in his garden for another long minute before he posed his question.

“Have you ever been violated, Reno?”

Reno’s blood froze, and his head turned to Vincent.

“Touched against your will?”

Before Reno could even think of an answer, let alone shape his mouth to form one, Vincent clarified. 

“You don’t have to answer that. My intention is for you to consider the following: Cloud may be able to get his mind back from Sephiroth, some day.”

With that, Vincent turned his head to face Reno, and looked him directly in the eye.

“He can never get his body back from Hojo.”

Reno felt as though he would either vomit or burst into tears. It suddenly hit him: why Cloud danced fully clothed, why he insisted on covering himself with ink or darkness, why he was transforming himself into something more unrecognizable by the day, why he felt happy and comfortable around Reno as he searched for more modifications that would suit his own projected image of himself.

He was trying to save himself from Hojo; from Jenova, both long dead, but reaching up for him through every pore and fiber of hair on his body.

Another sigh, and Reno leaned forward on his elbows, looking down at the table. He reached into his pocket for a cigarette, but then stopped himself, and looked at Vincent for permission.

Vincent took out a shiny, metal lighter, flicked it, and offered it to him. He muttered his thanks and then sat back, smoking, damp eyes shifting between different points in Vincent’s garden.

“Do it for him, Reno,” Vincent said, sensing his discomfort. “It will help him. It most certainly helped me.”

Reno had never before experienced such a high form of flattery--even when Cloud gave him intimate pieces of himself that were closed to others. That his gross, violent, aggro-art project that was originally meant to fulfill his own nihilistic needs could actually _help_ someone like Vincent--let alone, his lover--was completely beyond him.

“I--” Reno stopped, and corrected himself, hating how hoarse he sounded. He cleared his throat. “We don’t wanna lose him again.”

Vincent ignored the correction. “You certainly will lose him, if you don’t.”

\--

As Vincent poured him another cup of tea and whiskey, he explained to Reno in the best way he could the process of he and Cloud’s rope play sessions.

It was nothing Reno could get behind.

“So it doesn’t… feel good?” He asked.

Vincent smiled. “It’s a different sensation altogether. The submissive party cannot submit either verbally or by any action of their own. They cannot even submit to _me._ ”

“So… what are they submitting to?”

“Themselves. The situation. The fact that they are trapped, out of control, and must only rely on their own mind for comfort. Their bodies would soon follow.”

Reno scratched his head.

“It’s better that you experience it yourself,” Vincent chuckled, which was such a strange noise to Reno. “Or watch it.”

Reno’s eyes lit up. “Can I?”

Vincent hummed pensively. “I would need Cloud’s permission first.”

Easy enough. Reno rang Cloud, waited for him to answer, hit the speaker button, and held his phone up.

_“Yeah?”_

Reno heard the familiar buzzing of a tattoo machine in the background. He pushed the certainty that he was supposed to be with Tifa out of his mind, and allowed Vincent to talk.

“Cloud,” Vincent said, leaning toward the phone. “It’s Vincent.”

 _“Uhh…”_ Cloud sounded as if he’d been caught doing something wrong. _“Okay?”_

“I’m with Reno, and he’s asked for permission to view one of your videos.”

Reno had been so quick to ring Cloud, but he suddenly felt embarrassed when Vincent had repeated their intentions out loud. Cloud had no way of knowing why Reno wanted to do just that, and it was not normal for Reno to be with Vincent in the first place. He felt like some kind of weird voyeur.

_“Sure, but… ow. Why didn’t he just ask me?”_

“Are you alone, Cloud?” 

_“No?”_

“Then it might not be a conversation to be had at the moment, but I assure you, nothing is wrong.”

_“Can I talk to him?”_

Reno flipped the phone off of speaker, and held it to his ear. “Hey, shorty.”

Vincent turned away to the window briefly to give them privacy. The conversation lasted only seconds, but had the lasting effect of making Reno nervous that he’d given Cloud something to be concerned about. _I’ll talk to you about it soon_ wouldn’t have cut it for him, at least.

Vincent retrieved his phone and led Reno around to the opulent couch in his living room that spanned the length of it, and the large TV. 

Reno set his glass down on a coaster. He had no idea what he was about to watch: if it would be like viewing porn, or something deeper and more twisted than he wanted to know about his two friends.

“You wanted to see the most recent session?”

Reno nodded; that was the one that sparked the fire in the last fuck they had. 

“Here.” Vincent took his seat one cushion over from Reno, crossed his legs, and casted the video.

In it, Cloud seemed flustered about something. He was clothed in the same outfit he wore to visit Reno later that evening, but deeply agitated as he walked past the camera off screen.

 _“You’re restless,”_ came Vincent’s voice.

 _“.... Yeah.”_ In the distance, the sound of Cloud’s clothes rustling and his boots hitting the floor echoed into the microphone.

_“Anything you want to discuss?”_

_“Just--”_ A grunt. _“Issues. Children.”_

_“Issues?”_

_“No, I don’t want to discuss it.”_ Cloud came back on screen, and centered himself. He was completely naked, barefoot, and stood upright in the large room that held the rig overhead.

Vincent came into shot, fully clothed with shoes, a stark contrast in power to Cloud’s shorter stature and nudity. Reno caught a glint of blue rope dangling on his other side. As he drew nearer to him, Cloud’s chest and shoulders rose and fell, drawing deep breaths into his nose and out through his mouth, a coping mechanism for his anxiety.

Vincent placed a wide palm down onto Cloud’s right pectoral muscle. Cloud closed his eyes.

 _“Breathe,”_ Vincent said, drawing his breath out for as long as he could with the word, coaxing Cloud to follow his lead.

They repeated this several times, with Vincent inching closer to Cloud until he was nearly standing on top of his feet.

 _“How do you feel now, Cloud?”_

Vincent’s voice was so much like butter, it even had a calming effect on Reno, just watching. He glanced over at Vincent, who remained stoically watching the video.

Eyes still closed, Cloud nodded. _“Better.”_

 _“Good.”_

And in a flash, Vincent had his arms locked around Cloud’s elbows, shook the rope free, and tied Cloud’s wrists behind his back.

“Oh shit,” Reno couldn’t help but exclaim. It had caught him--and Cloud, it seemed--by total surprise.

Cloud instinctively struggled back, trying to prevent himself from falling--the shock he had turned into a look of defensive anger--but Vincent made quick work of that attempt by swiping his ankles out from under him. Cloud yelped, but he was caught by his bound wrists just before his face hit the floor, and Vincent lowered him gently onto his stomach.

_“Still feeling better, Cloud?”_

Cloud looked as though he wanted to say something, but didn’t. Vincent placed a knee into his back as he went to work tying his intricate patterns around Cloud’s chest, his torso, turning him and binding his arms to his front, all the while suffering no more than huffing, puffing, and pained, furious looks on Cloud’s face.

Reno had to wonder if this was part of a game, or if these were real expressions.

The way Vincent handled Cloud--roughly, but with no change in urgency or emotion for himself--mesmerized Reno. He kicked Cloud’s legs apart, pulled the rope under his cunt in a way that pronounced its shape, and finished tying off his midsection.

Reno didn’t know whether to be impressed by Vincent’s speed, ruthlessness, tying skills, or Cloud’s tolerance.

The biggest change occurred when his legs were wrapped and then tied to the part of his back that held his shoulders taught. Cloud groaned loudly, his cheeks blushing violently, his head being pulled back, neck exposed, and finally swore at Vincent through gasped breaths. The sight tempted Reno’s cock.

 _”Fuck you, Vincent, this_ hurts…”

Vincent roped the beautifully hog-tied Cloud to his rig, and began to pull, hoisting Cloud up, the younger man grunting in discomfort with each movement. 

_”I know it does, lad,”_ was all Vincent said. 

__

Reno turned to where Vincent sat, and saw that the space next to him was empty. 

When Cloud was out of frame, Vincent moved the camera to set it directly beneath him. 

_”I… I can’t breathe…”_ Cloud gasped, drawing in deep breaths again, eyes closed, and skin completely flushed. He opened them again, blue slits meeting the camera directly. 

_”You can breathe, Cloud. Trust me._

Cloud fidgeted,as though he were trying to move some-- _any_ \--part of his body. He seemed as though he were on the verge of hyperventilating. 

_”My leg… hurts.”_

_”Does it really?”_

Cloud took a few deep breaths, closed his eyes, and waited to answer. 

_”No,_ ” he finally gasped. 

_”Good.”_

That was the last Reno heard of Vincent for the longest time. For the next thirty minutes, he watched, in deep, half-aroused fascination, as Cloud transformed, almost cell by cell. 

For the first ten minutes, he had trouble controlling his breathing. Every muscle he moved appeared to cause him to grit his teeth in pain or gasp. He was constantly making soft, frightened noises with his breaths, even threatening to cry at some points. 

But then his breathing eventually calmed when he found a rhythm, and he closed his eyes. 

The redness gradually went away, and then Cloud went completely still. 

The last thing to go was the furrow in his brow. 

Cloud hung in the air there, his arms and legs twisted, cutting into the rope by his own weight, like some delicate insect caught in a web, waiting to be consumed. The only movement came from the two strands of hair that fell on either side of his head, disturbed every now and again by a soft breath.

Reno felt the weight of Vincent next to him again, but he was too captivated by Cloud to turn to him. 

“What is he thinking about?” 

“You should ask him,” Vincent replied. 

Reno watched the entire video, until the red color drained from Cloud’s face, and he appeared to be no more than sleeping. 

At last, Vincent’s voice returned. 

_”How are you, lad?”_

Cloud opened his eyes, blue glint by blue glint, lids dragging upward in the slowest manner Reno had ever seen. 

He looked at Vincent, and then closed them again, ignoring him. 

Reno knew that look. Cloud couldn’t feel shit. It was like a dope-high, without the damaging aftermath of the body and mind. 

He was, quite literally, metaphysically, and metaphorically, flying. 

Thirty-five minutes into the session, one side of Cloud’s mouth appeared to have peaked upward into the tiniest of smiles. 

What it must be like, Reno wondered, to be left alone from all of one’s self-doubts, self-hatred, insecurities and failures; to send every resource of the mind into the unified effort of numbing the pain of restriction. It was brilliant. 

Eventually, Vincent returned, and called for Cloud’s attention. 

_”It’s time,”_ he said. 

_”No,”_ Cloud cried out, still not fully himself. Vincent began the process of lowering Cloud anyway. 

The way he gently handled Cloud as he undid his ropes, and set him down on his side to finish gave Reno a new respect for Vincent’s craft. It was no wonder why people came to him. 

Free from the ropes, and adorning his new patterns, Cloud unfolded himself, and then curled up into himself on the floor, as if he were trying to bind himself in a new way. 

Reno’s mind flashed back to the way Cloud slept, curled tightly with chin tucked, and wondered if there was any relationship. 

The video ended with Vincent hauling a limp, boneless Cloud over his shoulders and out of frame. 

Reno sat back, and sank into the couch. 

He felt as if he’d just seen one of the modern re-enactments of _Loveless,_ and had an epiphany about one of the deep meanings of its loveliest, yet most incomprehensible verses, and the context of the whole story had been made clearer. 

\-- 

Shortly thereafter, Reno thanked Vincent and wished him a good night. 

“You’re welcome to come and try it out for yourself,” Vincent suggested kindly, “if you’d like.” 

Reno imagined himself being shoved to the ground, frothing at the mouth, swearing violently, fighting against every swirling pattern that Vincent would make. How ugly that would be compared to the almost ballet-like suspension of Cloud. 

"I think I’m good,” he said. “Too rich for my blood.” 

Vincent nodded. “Of course. But… I do work wonders with brats.” 

Reno hadn’t been called a brat in recent memory, but he smirked at the word: after all, it accurately defined who he was for many years. 

“I’ll bet you do,” he said, as he stepped away from Vincent’s door. “You’ve got Cloud.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First time writing Vincent, I hope I did him justice.


	4. Hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _It had been discussed in secret behind their backs: both Cloud and Tifa were selfish._
> 
> Reno's neutrality is challenged when Tifa calls him in the middle of the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter is [Dłońie](https://youtu.be/Edpp8MBPAn0) ("Hands") by Lao Che. Lyrics are [here](https://www.tekstowo.pl/piosenka,lao_che,dlonie.html) and easily translatable.

Hours after getting back from his visit with Vincent, a phone call at one in the morning woke Reno.

He looked at the screen. 

“The fuck…?”

Tifa _never_ called him. If she needed to talk to him, which was usually an inquiry regarding Cloud’s whereabouts or something about his person, she would always text. Something bad must have happened. 

He answered immediately.

“Tifa?”

In the five years since he’d first caught sight of her, he’d never seen that girl cry, nor could he imagine it. The silence and strained voice disturbed him.

“Reno,” she said, between a strong sniffle that had obviously come after a long attempt to suppress it. “I’m so sorry, it’s late--”

Reno popped up and threw his blanket off. “What’s going on?”

Tifa paused to gather herself, but the crying didn’t stop. 

“I screwed up this time.”

\--

It took Reno only a few minutes to throw on a pair of pants and a hoodie over the tank he slept in. The walk to the twenty-four hour cafe at the Edge fountain took him about fifteen.

Tifa was already waiting at an outside table with two coffees, and the most recently acquired orphan secured against her chest in a carrier. Eyes and cheeks red and puffy, she stood up to meet him as he approached. 

Reno couldn’t help but feel incredibly sorry for her. With the number of orphans in her care steadily increasing, it could only be a matter of time before either she or Cloud snapped.

“That girl shouldn’t be out here in this night air like that,” Reno said to her as he went in for a hug. She lingered with hands on his back, and sighed deeply, sniffing as tears pattered onto his shoulder. That was a first for them--and it was nice. Tifa had never liked Reno, and it was no secret that she was jealous and bewildered by his relationship with Cloud. However, their shared feelings for him created warmth in their embrace that would not have been possible otherwise. 

“The _aiku_ gonna get her,” Reno said, invoking the old wives tales of his mother’s people. He smoothed a knuckle against her cheek and smiled. She was wide awake, and turned to look at Reno. She recognized him, and reached up.

“What else am I supposed to do?” Tifa said, exhausted. “Can you take her for a second?”

Reno was already lifting the girl from Tifa. Having raised three of his siblings himself, babies were no mystery to Reno, but the experience was not one he missed, and it was certainly not for everyone. Every time he popped in for a visit with Tifa and Cloud, it made him anxious to imagine what went through Cloud’s mind with so many small, needy creatures around him that required validation and emoting that he couldn’t even provide for himself.

Reno sat with the baby on his hip, noted to himself that she had no socks and a possibly wet diaper, and took a sip of coffee.

“So what happened, girl?”

Tifa placed her face in her hands, dragged them down to clear it, and then blew air out of her mouth.

“We got into it.”

“Where is he?”

She shook her head and closed her eyes. “I don’t know. He took off.”

This wasn’t the first time Cloud had disappeared after becoming overwhelmed, so when Tifa burst into tears again and covered her face, Reno knew that something had gone horribly wrong. This wasn’t Tifa. These were real sobs: they didn’t come from anger or frustration, but a realization of sorts. Perhaps a feeling of permanent loss.

“He cut off his tracking link to my phone,” she said, setting her device down harshly onto the table. “And he’s screening my calls.”

Reno’s empathetic nature caused him to reach out and slide his right hand against Tifa’s forearm while the other kept the baby secure. She accepted the touch and laid a hand out over his. His heart sank for her. Cloud was always very careful about saying anything negative about Tifa, but the open secret was that things had not been going well, and that Tifa was having a hard time accepting not only Cloud’s multiple relationships, but his absence and constant change in appearance. Reno could tell just by Cloud’s reluctance to leave his place, and his reports about his past weeks involving less and less of her or time at Seventh Heaven.

It had been discussed in secret behind their backs: both Cloud and Tifa were selfish; Tifa wrangled him with children and a father role that he neither wanted nor had any capability of fulfilling, and Cloud was having his cake and eating it too by doing the bare minimum in the relationship, but keeping her around for comfort’s sake. The term _convenience_ had been thrown around--albeit not lightly--about both of them. 

Nobody had the balls to say anything to either of them about it, though, and now they were both apparently suffering. Reno felt partially responsible, not the least because he benefited greatly from Cloud’s increasingly frequent separations from Tifa.

He mentally prepared himself, and asked: “What did you say to him?”

Tifa used a napkin to wipe at her nose, then blew it. Recalling the memory looked painful for her. “I said that--”

“Start at the beginning,” Reno advised, hand on his coffee. He’d given the baby his braid to keep herself busy with, and focused on speaking with as much focus and clarity to Tifa as she deserved. She didn’t have to come to him with this, and her pride was undoubtedly wounded because of it. “What started the whole thing?”

Tifa hesitated.

“It was the tattoos.”

\--

“Every day is a battle for me. I wake up at four thirty in the morning with the baby, I have to feed her, I have to feed Marlene and Denzel, they help with the younger two, I make sure they have their things ready for school, I have to open the bar, I have to prep, I have to cook, I have teenagers, I can’t do this.

I need Cloud. I need his help. He’s never here. When he’s here, I can’t relate to him. I can’t speak to him. He doesn’t tell me what he does when he’s gone, he has little interest in the things we do together, or the things we do with the kids--”

Knots tightened in Reno’s stomach. He didn’t know Tifa well, but he certainly knew that she would not enjoy listening to Cloud talk about the new brandings he got, or how freeing his moments with Vincent were, or how he stayed up all night getting faded and listening to music with Reno. Cloud had just been remaining quiet. He knew where this was going, but was silent and allowed Tifa to vent.

“--the kids are more helpful to me than he is. Which is sad, and makes me so, so angry.”

Tifa shook as she said this, and Reno could see the picture of their home clearly: Tifa, running around crazy, trying to take care of everyone, _hey Cloud, can you this for so-and-so, can you help so-and-so with homework, can you change so-and-so’s diaper_ with each valid request sending Cloud into a near-aneurysm. Cloud had once ashamedly admitted to Reno that children frightened him. And why shouldn’t they? The last time he’d been around kids was in Nibelheim, when they were cruel to him, and his emotional development had stopped then, until now. 

_Until now._

_Children_ are _scary,_ Reno had reassured him, placing a hand on the back of his neck while lying next to him.

“Go on,” Reno urged.

“He came back from your place two days ago. I was…” Tifa closed her eyes and swallowed. 

“I was already in a bad mood. He was supposed to have been there early. The sink was broken, and I needed it done, but I ended up calling someone to do it for me. I was angry when he walked in. He told me to just take it out of his account.”

“And then?”

Tifa sighed and waved her hand. “I’m not going to bore you with the details. It just escalated. Fast. I don’t even know what we said.”

“When did it escalate?”

Tifa seemed resigned to admitting her part in the fight, and her brow turned downward as she looked away. The words came fluidly. 

“At that point, I snapped at him every time he said something. He took off his jacket, and I saw his arm wrapped in plastic, with blood dripping on the inside. I thought it was just another tattoo, but I asked him what it was and he unwrapped it and--”

Reno recalled the phone call he made to Cloud while at Vincent's. Cloud had gone and gotten scarification done, which was rather extreme for those who had an aversion to body modification in the first place. With what he had finally understood about Cloud’s tattoos and why they were important, Reno knew that Tifa’s story was about to go down a very depressing route.

“--god, Reno, I nearly puked.”

Out of curiosity, Reno asked: “Did you see what it was?”

“No. And he seemed so proud of it, and happy. It’s like this new thing is all that matters to him. And so I told him that it was gross, and asked him what the kids would think if they saw it.”

Reno could tell just by looking at her that she realized that her invalidation of Cloud’s feelings was likely the main catalyst in him storming off, but it was certainly not the entire cause of the blowout. It was becoming harder to listen to; not just because of Tifa, but because he was imagining Cloud’s disconnect with her and the world around him growing as every second of this fight passed.

“And he said....?”

“He said--”

_“Why do you have a problem with absolutely everything I do?”_

_And I scolded him like a child._

_“You’re acting like Denzel.”_

_His eyes darkened. “I’m not one of your fucking children.”_

_I went cold. “What did you just say to me?”_

_I was speaking to his back, though. He turned and left out the back, climbing the stairs to the rooftop._

_I followed him--_

“You shouldn’tve,” Reno couldn’t help but interject. It wasn’t just for Cloud’s sake, but for hers too.

“I know.”

_I grabbed at his arm as we got to the roof. He snatched it away and made a hissing sound, I think I touched an open wound._

_I shouted at him._

_“What is wrong with you?! Why are you doing this?”_

_“Doing_ what?” __

_I was so mad then, but now I see that he was confused. Angry. Hurt._

_“Why won't you talk to me?”_

_“Why don't you ever_ listen?” __

_“You only ever talk about the past, how bad things were, how bad you were, I'm so sick of it--”_

_“That's why I don't talk to you!”_

_I ignored him._

_“And this crap!”_

_I grabbed at the hem of his shirt where his side tattoo is, and pulled it up. He swiped my hand away and gave me that look, that look he has when he has his sword in front of him._

_“All of it! You’re scaring me, Cloud! You're_ mutilating _yourself!”_

Tifa put her head down for a second. 

Reno busied his senses by taking a large drink of the bitter coffee. When he'd put hands on Cloud in a similar manner, he'd gotten hurt. Tifa was lucky. He didn't want the image of Cloud's pained look, swirling with violence, in his head. 

_“I'm tired of this,” I said, “I'm tired of you feeling sorry for yourself. I want the old Cloud back--”_

_“_ Who _is this old Cloud,” he said, his voice rising, and there were tears and hair blowing into his mouth, it was so windy. “You don't even know what you're talking about.”_

_“The Cloud that cares--”_

_“I_ do _care.”_

_“The Cloud that's here for me, that'll help people who need him, the Cloud that saved the world--”_

_He turned away._

_“The Cloud that saved_ me-- _”_

_He went towards the ledge. I've never seen him so furious and dark, not with me. He cut me off, he groaned harshly through his teeth._

_“Tifa,” he said, “if you say another word, I swear I'm going to vomit.”_

_I went after him again. I wanted him to look into my eyes as I told him how beautiful he is, how wonderful he is, everyone loved him, why couldn't he understand it--_

She stopped, and swallowed.

Reno waited. 

_“--n't you understand that--”_

_He turned on me._

_"BECAUSE I'M A PIECE OF SHIT!"_

_He screamed so loud, right into my face, it echoed off the buildings._

_I couldn't move._

_He was breathing so hard, hyperventilating, eyes wide and just bleeding pain, and I think it was fear._

_He was afraid of me._

_“Why can't_ you _understand that?” His voice cracked, like I'd hit him and he was asking me why._

_We were both crying silently, feet apart. It could have been miles. I took a step, and he took a step back, and I stopped._

_I wanted him in my arms like all the other times._

_“But you're not,” I tried._

_He looked so disgusted with me as he jumped off the ledge._

_I heard his bike engine._

"--and that was it."

They sat in silence for a long time. 

Wordlessly, Reno stood up with the sleeping baby, and handed her back to Tifa. Tifa adjusted her on her shoulder, and he sat back down and lit a cigarette, beginning their next phase of pensive silence. 

There was a lot to absorb. Reno turned his head off to the side as his mind went into overdrive processing the many faces of Cloud: the half-lidded, blue-fire arousal of their recent night together to the struggle for comfort while in ropes to his blitzed out gaze when he accepted that there wasn't any, and finally to the frightened boy that had escaped Tifa's maddening persistence on the roof, unable to either defend himself or offer a valid explanation for his erratic behavior.

And then there was Tifa, who couldn’t be wholly blamed. She was a do-or-die person, someone who lived for her responsibilities and took almost no time to think about herself or her own feelings, a trait of hers that often bled into the boundaries of others. She meant well, but she had consistently failed to understand the true context and meaning of her relationship with Cloud, just as he had failed to set his own boundaries with her. Their intentions were flying over each other’s heads.

The two were so synonymous with each other-- _Tifa and Cloud_ \--that it seemed perverse to put it in such a context, but Reno had several years on the both of them, and he knew a toxic, codependent relationship when he saw one.

As if she could hear his thoughts, she asked, staring down into the grating of the table, “What am I doing wrong?”

Reno was used to giving people relationship advice, but not when one of the parties was so intimately involved with him. He chose his words wisely.

“I think you and Cloud are on different fuckin’ planets right now,” he blurted out. “Honestly.”

Tifa blinked slowly at him. “I don’t understand.”

“I think you two have some serious communication issues. Neither of you seem to know what the other wants. Or care.”

Tifa sat upright and shook her head. “I tell him what I want all the time. _He_ doesn’t tell me he wants anything, ever.” 

Reno wondered how easily the meaning of what Tifa said could slip right by her. 

“Maybe he doesn't want anything."

Tifa narrowed her eyes at him, but it was a look of wanting to understand, rather than hostility.

“What do you mean?”

Reno considered the conversation he had with Vincent, the new understanding he had of Cloud's mindset. He lit another cigarette.

“You love Cloud, don’t you?”

She nodded. “Of course I do.”

“Good.” He exhaled. “I do too.”

He let that sink in for a moment. He’d never said that out loud, and until the day that he and Cloud never spoke again, he likely would never say it again. Even Tifa gave him her full attention after hearing it.

“You love him enough to leave him the fuck alone whenever he’s not meeting your performance standards?”

Tifa glared at him. Reno glared back. 

“What am I missing?” She asked, voice finally clear of emotion.

She honestly didn’t know, and for that reason, Reno told her.

“Everything.”

Tifa stared through him.

“Cloud ain’t never been anything but what other people wanted him to be. As his oldest friend, he’s expected you to know that. You’ve expected him to go on being someone that he never was in the first place, based on some promise you two had when you was kids, when neither of you knew what the hell you were talking about. ”

She continued to stare, eyes glossing over.

“When you say it that way,” she started slowly, “it sounds ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous,” Reno admitted. “It’s fucking stupid. The problem is that Cloud never learned how to say ‘no,’ and that’s why y’all are in this mess today. He don’t know how to talk, you don’t know how to listen.”

“I _do_ listen,” she whispered.

“But you hate everything he’s got to say. You hate how he feels about himself. You hate what he does to his body. You hate the time he takes to think about things.”

With each “you hate,” Tifa seemed to slump more into guilt and exhaustion, which Reno had learned as an interrogator, brought one always closer to the truth.

“This ain’t the same Cloud that wanted to be like Sephiroth, and it ain’t the same Cloud that fought him in that crater. It ain’t the same Cloud that you fell in love with.”

“But _why_? Why isn’t it?”

Reno pressed on. “Who _is_ Cloud, Tifa? Do you know, really? Honestly. I'm not sure. I can damn well tell you to your face that even _he_ doesn’t know.”

She shook her head. “I thought I knew. But I don’t know this Cloud.”

“Pretty sure he’s starting to realize that too, Tifa. Trust."

Tifa stared at the cross crossing metal in the table for a long while. Reno felt the urge to explain to Tifa the meaning of their fight; that Cloud telling her that he’s a piece of shit didn’t mean that he wanted to be treated like one forever, but that he just wanted his friend to accept him for who he is, and forget about who he isn't. He loathed to speak for someone who wasn’t there to speak for himself, however, and other people interpreting Cloud’s thoughts and feelings for him--incorrectly, often--were a contributing factor in this meltdown. 

In truth, there wasn’t enough time in the day to explain to Tifa all the signs she’d missed, and as he would be tasked with locating Cloud after their conversation, he needed to send Tifa home with a good feeling about the future and head out.

He sighed, and yawned. “Cloud needs time, Tifa. Maybe if you could just give him that time to figure out--”

“No.”

Reno blinked. “No?”

Tifa lifted her head. The life in her eyes had returned, although still framed by the redness from her tears. 

“I don’t _have_ time.”

She was devastated, but her voice gained firmness and strength as she wiped her eyes one last time, and sucked the mucus back up her nose. She sighed, and then succumbed.

“I understand. Life… hasn’t been kind to Cloud,” she said. “It hasn’t been kind to me either, but Cloud has suffered. I do get that, Reno. But it’s been five years, and…”

Reno listened intently, brow knitted with a combination of surprise, empathy and sympathy for them both.

“... And I need to get on with my life. Cloud can work, feed, clothe himself, and defend himself.” She nodded to the child in her arms. “These kids _can’t._ I’m their mother. They need to come first.”

Reno felt the immense amount of power and affirmation that Tifa had invoked to state her last sentence, and he understood why Cloud admired her so.

“I can’t take care of him anymore. He needs to think about the children, too. I don’t want them seeing him like this. I don’t want them seeing _anyone_ like this. He needs to start behaving like a functioning adult at home.”

Reno said gently, “I dunno that he’s capable of that, not right now.”

“Then he needs to _go_.” Her voice broke when she said it, but only a little bit by then.

Reno nodded firmly. It was her breakthrough. It was real, and honest, and free of masked emotions or childishness or misplaced guilt. He placed his hands over hers.

“You need to tell him that, then.”

\--

They parted ways with an even longer, sweeter hug than the one they greeted each other with.

“I’m sorry I blamed you,” she said into his ear. When she pulled away, she told him that he gave such good hugs.

“Should I start sellin’ ‘em?” He asked as he sent her home with another.

“Find him, please,” she’d whispered as she and the baby pulled away.

It hadn’t been an appropriate time to tell her that Reno also had Cloud’s location tracked on his phone, and his _had not_ been blocked, so he just reassured her with a nod and headed back to his flat to retrieve his weapon, then off to the remains of Sector Five.

\--

Aerith’s church was like a worn, centuries-old print of its former self. The roof had caved in completely since Reno had last visited, and the flowers had ceased to grow. It was so completely uninhabitable that even Cloud wouldn’t have been able to make it into a suitable getaway for himself.

But Reno found him there by moonlight, sitting on the ground between the fallen support beams he had chased him on years before, among layers of rotting petals and the weeds that had grown in the flowers’ place. His knees hugged up to his chest, he stared out at the silhouetted mountains of junk through the gaps in the structure.

Reno heard a sniffle echo through the pillars, and wondered how long he’d been crying.

He lowered his arm and powered his rod down. Keeping his distance, he pulled his phone out to text Tifa, as promised.

found him. hes fine

Before the moving ellipses could materialize into words, Cloud called out to him hoarsely:

“If you’re out there, just fucking say something already.”

Reno slipped his phone in his back pocket and moved toward Cloud. It was as Tifa had said: there was no precedent for this. Cloud being openly angry and embittered and expressing it was quite a thing to behold.

Unsure if Cloud wanted or needed contact, he stopped a few feet back, and to the side of Cloud, before sitting. 

“Reno,” Cloud said, without turning around.

Reno froze. "How'd you know it was me?" 

"Your footfalls. Everyone walks differently."

Reno smiled, and scooted closer to him. 

They both went silent for a long time, aside from Cloud’s sniffling. Occasionally he wiped his eyes in the crook of his elbow.

“Talked to Tifa?” Cloud finally asked. 

“Yeah. We talked.”

“What’d she tell you?”

Reno wasn’t sure how to respond to the animosity in Cloud’s voice. He did know that divulging the contents of his conversation with Tifa in even small pieces at this point would be a reckless and wasteful decision.

“She told me that she loves you,” he said.

"Bullshit." Cloud scoffed, as expected. “How can she? She can’t stand the fucking sight of me.”

“The same way that you can’t apparently stand the fuckin’ sight of her either,” Reno said. “Yet, you still love her. Don't you?"

Something about what he said seemed to calm Cloud’s nerves. His breathing evened, and the time between sniffles lengthened.

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yeah?” Reno moved up so they were side by side. 

"I always thought she was what I wanted. Now every time I'm around her, I feel like I'm fucking drowning."

That was the first time Cloud had put a complete thought together about his feelings in a statement. Reno had heard one from Tifa that was powerful and meaningful, and he wanted Cloud to do the same. He decided not to go the route of feeding Cloud any information at all from Tifa: he needed to figure out for himself that she felt the exact same way. 

"You two got history," Reno said. "A lot. But you're also grown. I think both of y'all need to start accepting each other for who you are and make a decision about what roles you want to take in each other's lives, 'cause this ain't working."

"I want it to work."

"Cloud," Reno sighed, "If you're running off every other week after a fight and staying gone, it ain't working. You're torturing her."

Cloud dropped his head between his knees. 

"She's torturing you, too. But you _know_ what she wants, and you _know_ you can't give it to her. Yet you can't open your pretty ass mouth and say 'Tifa, I don't wanna get married and have a family right now, I wanna be in a different bed every night and find out what kinda clothes I like to wear and what kinda things I like to do.'"

"I promised her--" 

"I don't wanna hear about no more fucking promises," Reno groaned, lighting a cigarette, then proceeded to go off on a half-mumbled tangent. 

"Fucking country asses… Making wishing well promises and shit. The world done ended twice now, and you're worried about a fucking promise you made when you were kids. Like it's the only thing you’ve got to live for. Fuck outta here."

Reno wasn't trying to be funny, but he heard Cloud snicker. Finally, Cloud leaned over and set his head against Reno's shoulder. 

"Why do you know so damned much?”

"Because I'm old, shorty." He wasn't really; Reno was only thirty-two, and his bloodline ensured that he'd always look at least ten or fifteen years younger than that, but it wasn't about the number. Life had started earlier for Reno, and his own hardships had given him a much clearer path than either Tifa or Cloud. 

Reno's phone buzzed. He moved to look at it, and Cloud lifted his head. 

_please don't say anything about our conversation  
just tell him I love him and need space_

Cloud looked as though he physically had to struggle to keep from asking if it was Tifa, but he didn't. 

"Can I crash at your place for a bit?" He asked instead. 

"Sure." Reno put his phone away, knowing that that was for the best, for now. "Lemme see your new piece,” Reno asked. 

Cloud removed his arm from the sleeve of his shirt and offered it to Reno in the moonlight. Reno took his stick and turned on the utility light so he could better see the red shapes of veins transforming into vines, and ran up to his elbow. His demeanor changed almost as soon as Reno asked. 

He felt safe.

He complimented the craftsmanship, pointing out how the accurate placement of the cuts made it seem like his own veins sprouted a garden.

"It'll look real nice when it's all healed up," Reno commented as he shut off the light. 

“Thank you. ” Relieved, Cloud tucked his arm back into his sleeve. “My mom used to try to garden,” he explained, using his other arm to wipe the rest of the drying tears from his face.

Reno sat and listened. It was the first time he’d ever spoken to him about his mother, and the fact that Tifa hadn’t been aware of the connection gave Reno more insight to the weight of their argument.

“She was bad at it, but the one thing she did right was a set of crawling vines on the side of our house.”

"Think she'd like it?" 

"Are you kidding? She'd go over my head with her ladle if she saw this." Cloud smiled softly at the memory. 

There was nothing Reno could say to convey the feeling of warmth and understanding that Cloud’s story gave him. Instead, he lay back, and placed his palm toward the gap that the broken steeple made into the sky.

“Wanna see something cool?” He asked. “Lie back.”

Cloud did so, and Reno showed him how to chart the galaxy’s stars by placing the most well known and brightest four at the tips of his fingers, and use his thumb as a compass.

“Cool,” Cloud exclaimed, turning his hand to the side, testing the map he made. “Is this a Cosmo thing?”

“Yep.”

Cloud turned to his side, and propped himself up on his elbow. “I thought you’d never visited.”

Reno folded his arms behind his head. “My moms taught me. Probably my last good memory of her before she lost her shit.”

“It’d make a dope tattoo.”

Reno smiled at Cloud’s use of the word _dope._ He sat up, and turned toward him.

“I wanna tell you why I started doing Brutal tattoos,” he said.

Cloud remained on his side, his body tensing, as if called to a relaxed attention.

_After Sephiroth that last time, you remember how weird things were. You had your visit to the Lifestream and was out of it for a long time when what was left of Shinra finally fell apart. We weren’t too popular._

“I wouldn’t imagine so,” Cloud said.

“Shh.”

_Anyway, the Turks disbanded formally, and I kinda wandered for a bit. I didn’t have nothin’ else to do. I was scared, too. I was expecting people to recognize me and throw shit at me, spit at me, or cuss me out. Nobody did a damned thing. Everyone was still grieving, too busy even to hate._

_For the first time in a long time, I was nobody._

_But they tore down all the posters of Rufus and his old man and drew nasty shit on all the logos. We understood why, but damn, you feel a certain way about it, right?_

_It was a weird time. You were fucked up, everyone thought you was gonna die, I didn’t have no purpose at the time, and I wanted to be angry along with everyone else. And_ back _at everyone else. I don’t got no regrets about Shinra. The only thing I regret is dropping that plate. That’s it._

Cloud sat up, lighting one of Reno’s cigarettes, and sat as close to possible to Reno.

_It wasn’t just Rude and I. Other Shinra survivors wanted to, too. We were guilty. We were sad. We were angry. We were victims. We were perpetrators. We gave ourselves Marks of the Traitor, long bands of shadows to blot out entire parts of us that went missing with everyone else._

By then, Reno was talking almost directly into Cloud’s face, the younger man hanging onto every word. 

_It hurt. We wanted it to. We wanted to suffer like everyone else. We wanted to show them we could take it. We wanted both our superiority and our humility._

_And then other people, civilians, came to us, wanting the same thing. They wanted to finish themselves off so they didn't hurt no more. They wanted to wear it on them so they didn't have to think about it._

They exchanged a long look, nothing moving but the plumes of smoke from their cigarettes. They weren't touching, they weren't fucking, and yet they shared a brief moment of connection and understanding that breached that of any other they'd had. 

Reno could see it by the moonlight in Cloud's eyes that being understood, even in this obscure way, meant the world to him. 

"Few things," he said, breaking the silence and moving to stand, crushing the butt of his cigarette in the crunchy petals. Cloud shook his head and followed suit, stopping only to look at Reno when the former Turk touched his shoulder to get his attention. 

"Number one: no more work on your body."

Cloud blinked, his head leaning back. "Why?" 

"I need a clean, healed canvas to work on."

Cloud's eyes brightened, but before he could say anything, Reno continued. 

"Two: If I do this for you, there are rules. I'll talk to you about it later, but when we finish, I'm gonna need some time away from you for a while."

Cloud's body shifted uncomfortably. "How much time?" 

"Iono." Reno stepped off to leave, and looked around. "Where's your bike?" 

"Here."

As they left, Reno stopped Cloud again and turned him, squaring his chest with his. 

"Three." Reno gave Cloud a serious look. "This is the last time I'm ever doing this, Cloud."

"The tattoo?" 

"Nah. Running after you."

Cloud looked down at his feet sheepishly. "I wasn't expecting you to--" 

Reno cut him off. "You're nearing thirty. You're too old for this shit, and so am I. So's everyone else. Tifa’s been too easy on you. You wanna take off again, you come back when you're ready to talk like a normal fucking person, or send a postcard or something. You hear me?" 

Nobody had ever said that to Cloud, but he needed to hear it, and was grateful.

"Got it."

The bike was just a few feet away, in one of the few spaces cleared of junk. 

As they moved toward it, Reno threw an arm loosely around Cloud's shoulder and then put him in a headlock. 

"Grown ass fucking man… The fuck I look like, chasing after your goofy ass?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Few things:
> 
> I tried so hard to show Tifa in a sympathetic light here, but I really wanted to write about the reality of partners who have known each other for a very long time and have never had time apart to grow and find out who they really are. If she comes off as a bitch, that's completely not my intention. Also keep in mind that this is _Advent Children_ Tifa: not _Remake_ Tifa, who is pretty dope and chill.
> 
> I also wanted to highlight what it's like to be in a relationship with someone who has severe post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and/or a possible personality disorder, where the sufferer can't possibly do anything but think about themselves all the time in order to keep from losing their mind. 
> 
> In my head, Reno's ethnic origin is Cosmo Canyon (Native American). Unfortunately, the only indigenous language I know is my own, so Reno spoke Samoan. The _aitu_ is a malevolent Polynesian spirit; one might compare it to a _djinn._ Old legends and folk beliefs include not letting children or vulnerable women and girls out at night, because the spirit will steal their soul or make them sick, etc. Basically, it's a boogeyman.
> 
> The beautiful song _Dłonie_ is a metaphorical poem about two lovers who care deeply for each other but have horrible fights. In the climax of the song, they realize--through the symbolism of their hands--that while they don't deny their feelings for each other, they simply cannot make it work. I've had this in my library for a long time and am so glad to write a scene that matches its humanity perfectly. <3


	5. Falling Apart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _That wasn’t their first night on the balcony, but it was their first kiss shared, mingled with pain, cold, and the throbbing heat of Cloud’s healing wounds._
> 
> Cloud needs to get away for a moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter is [Falling Apart](https://youtu.be/EvIR2OJolao) by Skeler.
> 
> CW/TW: self harm, Hojo stuff, gore, violence

_“Cloud!”_

_Cloud became aware of his surroundings and the two open gashes in his forearms--in exactly the same place they were last time--as soon as he heard Reno’s voice._

_The Plains. The gaping wound in the earth that opened to the Lifestream. The same place he attempted his last visit to the Lifestream, that put him in a coma._

_He didn’t even remember walking there._

_He looked behind him to see Reno’s hair flying everywhere, his jacket flapping open, running toward him, kicking dust and grass up behind him, still meters and meters away._

_“Cloud!”_

_As soon as he caught sight of the blood, he fell to his knees, furious with himself._

_“Shit.” He swore at himself and tried to cover the wounds with his hands. He'd dropped whatever blade he'd brought and didn't see it. He had no real weapon and no materia to heal himself with._

_“Goddamnit.”_

_Cloud stood up from his kneeling position, holding his arms, destroying his clothes with fresh blood, and walked toward his friend. He nearly fell over._

_Once the blood came into focus, Reno pushed himself, zipped behind Cloud, and seized him with his shoulders. The wind brought Cloud back to his knees, and Reno followed him._

_“Cloud, what the fuck!” He shouted right in Cloud’s ear as he tore off his track jacket, pulled himself out of his shirt, and began shredding it to pieces with his bare hands to make the most rudimentary of field bandages._

_Pitiful and embarrassed, all Cloud could do was shout back, “I’m fucking sorry, okay!?”_

_Reno was furious. Cloud would never forget the look on his face, or the hideous way his nostrils flared, how spit flew when he screamed._

_“Are you fucking crazy?!”_

_“Yes!” Reno kept shouting right over him. Cloud felt his chest begin to tighten._

_“You wanna fucking die that bad?!” He took the first strip of cloth and wrapped it around Cloud’s forearm. It soaked through immediately._

_“No!”_

_Reno didn’t believe him. The way he tied the bandages hurt much more than creating the wounds had, and Cloud cried out and doubled over as Reno tied the bandage so tight, he felt the meat beneath the cut split open._

__“Fuck _you, Cloud!”_

_That was Reno’s response to his physical pain._

_He did the same with the other arm, tripled up the cloth and then put his entire weight on the both of them, pushing Cloud’s forearms into the grass._

_They were eye level, but neither could bear to look at the other. They hadn’t been close for long. Reno’s reaction had completely shocked Cloud, but there was no relief behind it. It made him feel guiltier._

_With his right hand still pressed against one of the wounds, Reno pulled a bracer out of his pocket that had a single green orb in it. He used the weakest spell to slow the bleeding and give Cloud enough strength to walk, but not enough to begin healing the torn muscle._

_“Can you stand up?”_

_With effort, and using as little of his arms as he could, Cloud placed his hands on his bloodied jeans and pushed himself up. Reno went to help him when he tumbled over, but he held up a hand, steadied himself, and began the long walk toward the car that Reno had borrowed from Rude. Shirtless, Reno pulled his arms into the jacket and followed._

_It would have been too much to ask for the walk to have been in complete silence._

_“So that’s how it is, huh?”_

_Cloud felt light-headed, but he maintained his pace two steps ahead of Reno. He shook his head in dismissal._

_“You got all these fucking people around you, nursing your ass back to health, and you’re gonna put ‘em all through that shit again--”_

_Cloud turned to him. “Can I just have a cigarette?”_

_Reno looked at him in disbelief and then blew an annoyed raspberry, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Rather than light it for him as he would have, he shoved both the pack and the lighter into Cloud’s chest._

_“Thank you,” Cloud hissed. He squatted to light it away from the wind, and Reno begrudgingly moved to block it, an almost subconscious act._

_It took him a few tries. Bloody strands of yellow hair got in the way, blowing the flame out, but eventually he got it, and he tossed them back to Reno. When he stood, Reno squatted and did the same._

_The blood had slowed, but Cloud could still feel it drip down his wrists. They shouldn’t have taken this break, but there was no way he was going to get into a moving vehicle with Reno before they’d both calmed down._

_Halfway through their cigarettes--the wind took most of them--Reno finally asked, “So what the fuck are you trying to do, man?”_

_Cloud waited until he finished his cigarette, distracting himself from the ebbing pain with the horizon. It would get dark soon. Monsters would feast on the smell of his blood._

_“I wanted to talk to them again,” he said, honestly._

_Had he been in his right mind, he likely never would have told Reno the truth. They really weren’t on that level yet._

_Reno looked appalled, and he got to his feet again, taking an aggressive step toward him. “Who?”_

_“Them,” Cloud said, and as if they needed to be named: “Aerith. Zack.” He paused. “Sephi--”_

_“Are you fucking serious?”_

_Reno moved too quick for Cloud to intercept, and he jumped when Reno grabbed his biceps, hard, and shook him, violently punctuating every word with a sharp rattle._

_“They’re. Fucking. DEAD.”_

_Cloud’s eyes went wide. Every muscle in his body hardened. He stopped breathing as he looked into Reno’s furious eyes._

_“They’re not fucking coming back! _None_ of them are!”_

_The shock subsided, and Cloud’s eyes glazed over with fury, his brow cinching, mouth hardening._

_“They’re all dead, you fucking idiot, and you’re st--”_

_Before Reno could finish his sentence, Cloud wrenched his arm free, drew it back, and slammed his open palm into the left side of Reno’s face._

_It sent Reno stumbling over backwards, landing on his ass, then his arms, and bursted open Cloud’s wound._

_Everything went silent but the wind. Cloud impassively watched Reno hold his face for a moment in disbelief, until the split in his arm brought him to his knees as well._

_“... And you’re still alive,” Reno finished, looking at Cloud as his cheek began to swell._

\--

The ride back to Edge had been quiet, save for the noise of Cloud’s engine.

Reno might have dozed off on Cloud’s back for a moment. They arrived at his place well after three in the morning. He still had work in a few hours, and even though he’d decided to work remotely that day, he had every intention of crashing as soon as he could.

“I’m gonna get a shower,” Cloud said, dropping his duffel bag onto Reno’s living room floor and heading straight to the restroom. He moved the way he did on the streets, making himself small again and avoiding eye contact. “I’ll take the couch.”

Reno caught a glimpse of Cloud’s red cheeks and puffy eyes as he breezed past him. It occurred to him that this was the first time he’d ever seen Cloud cry openly, and that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with it himself. In Sector Five, Cloud had been protected by the pure darkness and the fact that they couldn’t see each other well. The both of them might have very well been embarrassed.

He was mentally and physically exhausted as well, and the suggestion to separate themselves was the best idea. Cloud needed some time to process his night. It didn’t bother him whatsoever, and in fact, Cloud’s decision drew respect from him. Literally jumping from one bed to the next after a relationship possibly ending was something a kid would do, and undeveloped as Cloud was, him separating their love life with his temporary living arrangements told Reno that there was a spark of maturity there; that whatever they had was special enough to be protected.

It pleased him that Cloud seemed to pick up on that. This was an arrangement between friends, not lovers, and it needed to be temporary. He had no idea how long Cloud would be staying, but it was a conversation that could wait until later.

“I’ll try to keep it down.” Cloud shut the door before he got a response, eager to be left alone.

“Right,” Reno said, turning to his room with a yawn. “See ya in the morning.”

\--

Showers were sometimes like the ethereal moments just before falling asleep for Cloud: they brought him the truth in vivid detail if he had no music along to distract him or no mate to share the space with him.

He set the heat close to high, placed himself under its trajectory, leaned back against the tiles and waited to see where it would take him. 

There was so much to unravel: he was angry and sad, right and wrong, hurting and relieved. He hadn’t the skills to separate any of them from each other. Thoughts of a furious Tifa’s mouth forming hostile words interspersed themselves with images of her weeping over him, when he was in his coma and could see and hear, but neither speak or move.

_She’s wrong, she’s jealous, she doesn’t get it, she’s out of touch._

He allowed the satisfaction of anger and indignation to fill his core, and lifted his head, furrowing his brow at the shower curtain.

_She’s scared. She cares about you. She’s always cared for you. She’s tired._

Cloud’s most vivid memory from his coma was that of Tifa speaking to him daily, her tears, her hands working his legs to keep him from getting bed sores, her tear-ridden breakdown:

_I can’t do this Cloud, not again, wake up, when will you wake up._

And then finally, her presence in the room: dutifully dusting, changing blankets and bandages, cleaning the blinds and the windows, but refusing to look at him.

His pain, his heart breaking, as he could say nothing to comfort her.

The feeling of being suffocated and trapped while still breathing. 

Cloud passed his hands over his face, and drew water into his eyes. 

He hissed as water passed underneath the plastic wrap onto his arm, and into his open wound. His mind went blank the second he processed the pain there.

 _Specimen._

Another needle slid into his arm. 

_Unremarkable. Stupid, even. But durable._

A tube in his throat, gloved hands manipulating his limp, cold body into a sitting position. His first of three comas where he had all senses but the inability to move or fight back. 

_You're taking too long to catalog its injuries._

Or yell. 

_Psychosomatic, Professor?_

Or say “no.”

 _Most likely. A mentally weak one, it is. Its mind probably caves in on itself at the first sign of trouble. Hmph._

Fingers roughly handling his genitals. 

_Another anomaly. Strange creatures, aren't they? I wonder if it can--_

Cloud's head hit the rim of the tub on his way down. 

\--

He opened his eyes to the sound of the curtain rings rattling and Reno's panicked voice. 

The shower was overheating. His reflexes returned to him just in time to flinch away from the boiling water, and he bolted upright and dragged in three deep, ragged, choking breaths. 

"For fuck's sake, Cloud!" Reno shouted over him, reaching over to twist the water off. 

Cloud heaved in air desperately as he scrambled out of the tub and onto the floor with Reno's help, soaking wet. 

Water pooled beneath them. He focused on that, the way the tiles felt under his fingertips, the shiver of cold air on his wet skin, and the slightly painful way Reno’s fingers dug into his armpits to hold him up.

“Breathe, kid,” Reno shushed, placing his left hand against Cloud’s wet hair, as the younger man’s chest cavity expanded and deflated in smaller intervals as the seconds went by.

“I’m fine,” Cloud said at last. Exhausted with himself, he pulled Reno’s arm from him and attempted to stand.

“You’re gonna bust your ass,” Reno warned, wearily.

He slipped acutely, catching himself against the wall, and used it as a guide to slide himself down.

He had a good, long look at Reno, who propped himself up against his toilet. The man was sleep deprived.

“What happened?”

Cloud shook his head and bit his lip. “I must have passed out.”

Reno blinked slowly and appeared to accept that. He hadn’t the energy for anything else.

\--

Reno could have gone to sleep, but he insisted that they unwrap the scarification piece, clean it, and then rewrap it with a new dressing.

The entire time, as he watched Cloud’s annoyed facial expressions, he wondered if his friend was reliving the similar memory they shared at the same time as him.

He saw that Cloud’s moodiness was entirely inward reflecting. He was tired of being a problem. 

Reno wished he could do something more than tell him to _breathe_ and invite him to his bed.

\-- 

_They were both covered in blood. Had it not been for the bandages around Cloud’s arms, it would have looked like they had just gotten into a street fight, but instead, anyone who saw them likely had a wild time guessing what kind of trouble they were heading back from._

_Reno’s hands were steady as he unwrapped Cloud’s bandages in his bathroom. The sky was dark, and the blood had already crusted over and turned brown._

_The last layer stuck to the exposed muscle, and Cloud hissed when the air hit it._

_“At least you got the same place,” Reno said quietly, as he took a bottle of ointment and dabbed a clean swab of cloth into the wound. “No new scars.”_

_He couldn’t look at Reno, whose left eye was beginning to swell shut. The tattoo there pulled upward, distorted._

_He turned his head down to his cuts instead. Just before Reno pressed the cloth into his skin, he felt every muscle in Cloud’s arm tense, and he gave his wrist a gentle squeeze._

_“Hey,” he said. Finally, Cloud looked at him, at the kind softness in his eyes, despite the damage he dealt to the left. “Don’t look at this.”_

_Completely unexpected, from a man who once made a living kidnapping and killing people, and a man who Cloud had always known to be nothing but fiery, impetuous aggression._

_He relaxed completely in Reno’s hands. He stopped looking at the wound, and instead focused on Reno, which allowed him to go on and clean the cut._

__This was a decent guy, _was the best he could come up with in words. The rest of him was a chaotic knot of guilt, appreciation, fear, and another soft emotion he couldn’t identify, because he had so little experience with it._

_“I’ve been through worse,” Cloud said, exhaling deeply as Reno went up the split in his skin with the salve._

_“Ain't we all."_

_He took a dry paper towel and pressed it against the wound to clear away excess fluid and ointment. Before moving on to the next arm, he picked the bracer off the top of the toilet seat, cast the spell, and together they watched the skin weave itself anew as Reno held it taut._

_"I'm putting a tracker on your phone," Reno said, unceremoniously as he began work on Cloud's left arm._

_Cloud rolled his eyes. "Tifa already has one."_

_"Tifa wasn't there today."_

_No, she wasn't. He had left, insisting that he needed to be alone, and she gave that to him._

_"Don't tell her, okay? About today."_

_Reno smirked as he prepared his cure spell. "I ain't no snitch, Cloud. Just don't make me use that thing."_

_The second dressing went faster than the first. As soon as Cloud could, he nearly jumped up from his seat on the toilet and went straight for Reno’s kitchen to make him an ice pack._

_They didn’t exchange apologies, or say another word for the rest of the night. Reno went out to the balcony for a cigarette, and Cloud met him there, wrapping the bag of ice in a dish cloth and pressing it against his cheek._

_Reno hissed at first, but then leaned into the contact._

_Cloud had to kneel next to him to do it. He half expected Reno’s machismo to kick in; that he would wave him away completely or simply thank him and take the ice pack to use himself._

_Instead, Reno’s hand came up and placed itself over Cloud’s, pressing the bag into his skin._

_Cloud’s lips found the side of Reno’s mouth. Reno turned his head just so. His tongue found Cloud's lips before the rest of his mouth did._

_That wasn’t their first night on the balcony, but it was their first kiss shared, mingled with pain, cold, and the throbbing heat of Cloud’s healing wounds._

_Sweet as the kiss--and the careful sex they had after--was, it was the moment that Cloud looked at Reno, covered in his blood with a black eye he himself had given him, bandaging him without judgment or anger, that changed their relationship._

\--

Reno woke up late to an empty bed. The space that Cloud occupied wasn’t even warm.

“Cloud?”

He rolled half-naked out of his bed, and saw that the bathroom door was ajar, lights off.

He entered and turned it on. Empty, and clean.

He called his friend’s name again through his small apartment. No response. Lights were off. His bag wasn’t in the same place he’d left it last night. 

Once he realized Cloud really wasn’t there, his mind flew into a familiar panic. He rushed for his phone, checked Cloud’s tracker, and saw that he was heading west, across the water. He dialed his phone.

“Cloud?”

Like at Vincent’s: _“Yeah?”_

“Where are you?”

A pause, but for the sound of wind and the road. 

_“Headed to Corel. I need to get out of the city for a bit. I left you a note.”_

A wave of relief washed over Reno momentarily. He went into the kitchen with the phone, and found an index card in Cloud’s chicken scratch on the counter. He blurted his next thought out loud: “What’s in Corel?”

He regretted asking. He knew who was in Corel, and it really wasn’t any of his business.

“Never mind,” Reno said, before Cloud could answer. “Just… let me know when you’re there.”

_“Sure.”_

Cloud hung up first. If he were going to visit Barret, then Reno had to believe him. The constant anticipation of something horrible occurring was doing neither of them any good.

Reno made himself a pot of coffee and started his day. 

\--

Were it not for the foul smell of the ocean, the underground tunnel to the Western Continent would be the most pleasant ride by bike. It was the amount of time it took to get there, too, that kept him from visiting Barret often, confining their visits to his sporadic trips to see Marlene and check up on the progress in Midgar.

His extremities were usually windblown to hell by the time he got there, and he was always tired, but there was comfort in knowing what was on the other side there, as well as the fact that he could stay for as long as he had no responsibilities elsewhere.

It was a good idea. Reno had no problem giving him space when he needed it, and he was always so calm and understanding of Cloud’s issues, but the truth was that he was really an impatient type who easily became annoyed when a solution to an issue didn’t present itself as easily to his friends as it did to him. 

_Just unfortunate enough to love me,_ Cloud thought, bitterly.

At this point, nothing felt worse than Reno potentially being irritated with him because of his own bullshit, and possibly fleeing the relationship. Space would do them good for a moment. 

He arrived at Barret’s new cabin at almost six in the evening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally meant to include the next chapter, which is a Barret/Cloud scene, but it's long enough on its own to be its own chapter. Since erotic/emotional scenes keep popping up in my head, this is probably going to be longer than I expected. School ends next week, so it won't take so long for me to finish this. ;)


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